The Trump administration has shuttered the Environmental Protection Agency’s scientific arm, the EPA Office of Research and Development. Hundreds of chemists, biologists, toxicologists and other scientists will lose their jobs under the administration’s plan to aggressively tear down environmental regulations and defund the EPA. Jennifer Orme-Zavaleta, a former top administrator in the Office of Research and Development, says the loss of the division means the loss of essential services like air and water quality monitoring that protects public health. “We are losing a treasure trove of historical knowledge, of scientific expertise, and really it’s going to limit what information, what science would be available for the agency to consider in protecting our health and our environment,” she says.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly rejected ceasefire deals and other chances to deescalate the devastating war in Gaza and beyond, all to remain in power and avoid corruption charges, according to a new investigation in The New York Times Magazine. “Netanyahu put the integrity of the coalition, the safety of his continuous rule of the government and the state … as a first priority ahead of any other priority,” says Ronen Bergman, Pulitzer Prize-winning Israeli investigative reporter.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

The survival of Ramesh, who was seated in an emergency exit in the aircraft, has been nothing short of miraculous. Earlier, a video, shared by many news outlets, showed Ramesh walking out of a building gate as plumes of smoke could be seen in the background. This was different from the now-viral video, which shows him walking towards the site of the crash.

Social media users have widely circulated the video questioning why he walked towards the site of the crash and emerged afterwards. Wondering what unfolded, many insinuated it was fishy that a man “shown as a survivor” was walking into the accident and coming out later. Some even said that this was the “reality” that was not being broadcast by media outlets. Below are some claims from X and Instagram. (Archives 1, 2)

Seriously?! is this for real? pic.twitter.com/PJimpwlJdl

— Lord Shiv (@lordshivom) June 18, 2025

Bit confused by seeing this viral video. The person who was shown as a survivor was found walking inside the accident zone area and then again he came out how’s that possible? I can’t believe this.#planecrash #ViralVideos#Accident #AirIndiaPlaneCrash #IranIsraelConflict… pic.twitter.com/eOIBysIAtN

— Amit Kumar Singh (@AmitSingh0208) June 18, 2025

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Mahadev ke deewane Hain ham (@sanju_bob_thakor_mahadev_)

Users on Facebook also shared the viral clip. Screenshots below:

Fact Check

Since information on passengers in the flight and Vishwas Kumar Ramesh’s boarding pass were published by many media outlets, we were certain that he was on the flight.

But to understand what was being shown in the viral video, we broke it down into key frames, and ran reverse image searches on some of them. This led us to several short videos where a man bearing a close resemblance to Vishwas Kumar Ramesh is seen entering the crash site more than once and exiting. Alt News went through many such videos generated by those at the site and tried to piece together the chain of events.

Our research found that Ramesh first exited the crash site when there were very few people around and tried to go back in twice to look for his brother, who was on the same flight. The new viral video, shared with conspiracy theories, shows him re-entering the crash site for the first time. He tried entering it a second time, too when there were more people at the site, who beckoned to him and called him back. When he emerged from the site this time, he was guided by these people to an ambulance. A video of his emergence and being taken to an ambulance was the same one shared by news outlets.

Here’s a breakdown of how we arrived at this:

We found one Instagram reel uploaded by user @ravibarthuniya on June 12, showing a man in a white t-shirt, standing across from the crash site, making his way across the street and entering the premises. His clothing and the fact that he was limping matched the description and visuals of Vishwas Kumar Ramesh seen emerging from the site.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Ravi Barthuniya (@ravibarthuniya)

We compared visuals in the viral video and this reel and found they were the same. Below is a comparison.

Thus, the viral clip does show Vishwas Kumar Ramesh entering the crash site. We also noticed that there was a scooter parked by the compound wall he entered and only few people around.

However, when this reel is compared with the video shared by news outlets showing him emerging from the site and being guided towards an ambulance, some things appear different.

For instance, the scooter against the wall seen in the first comparison image was removed. Also, there were a lot more people present at the site. This suggests that some time had passed between the two videos, and the clip of him emerging was taken later.

We also found another video on Instagram of Ramesh using his phone and entering the crash site. However, this is different from the previous video of him entering.

We also noticed that the scooter was removed and, unlike in the previous instance, the dog is absent. There are also more people. Multiple videos we watched confirmed that he entered the crash site not once, but twice.

In the second instance, the people present at the site call out to him after he goes in. When he comes out, a man in a pink shirt and blue turban is visible. Based on the video shared by news outlets, we know that he is the same person who guides Ramesh to an ambulance.

A video report by BBC India, posted on Instagram on June 18, identifies the man in the turban as Satinder Singh Sandhu. Sandhu, who supervises a fleet of ambulances, was the first emergency responder at the crash site.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by BBC News India (@bbcnewsindia)

We then reached out to Sandhu, who told us that when he arrived at the spot, he saw Ramesh going back into the premises. “I was just done shifting a victim to the ambulance. Then I saw him (Ramesh) near the gate. He went in and then came out again, after which I intervened and moved him to an ambulance,” he told us in Hindi.

Sandhu told the BBC that Ramesh, even after his rescue, “kept trying to go back to the site of the crash.”

“He had no idea what he was doing. He kept going in and out of the complex. We told him to stop, and dragged him away to an ambulance so that he could receive medical care… That’s when he said to me that his relative was trapped inside and he wanted to go save him. We did not speak a word after that,” he told the publication. At the time, Sandhu had no idea the man was the lone plane crash survivor. The emergency responder gave similar accounts to news outlets PTI, NDTV and UK-based DailyMail.

Thus, we were able to conclude that Vishwas Kumar Ramesh emerged from the crash site and tried going back near the burning wreckage at least twice to look for his brother. Piecemeal footage on social media from different angles and at different times has led to confusion regarding the chain of events. Alt News was unable to find footage that shows him walking away from the crash site the very first time. But we were able to establish that the now-viral video shows him trying to re-enter the first time, most likely to look for and save his brother.

The post Clip of Air India crash survivor Vishwas Kumar Ramesh going back to look for brother viral with conspiracy theories appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Prantik Ali.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jonathan Cook.

It has been an exercise in self-trust and clarifying my POV. I think there’s safety in doing what you’ve done before. That can feel comfortable and predictable and easily understood, even if it looks like dissent. So I think I’m still in whatever portal it is that I said yes to, and it’s ever evolving.

That makes sense. It’s an alchemical process when you step into a creative project, and you’re still inside the release part of it, where you get to experience it in front of other people and experience their reactions to it. That’s a huge part of the whole thing, I imagine especially for music.

Definitely. I opted out of playing shows directly after the release of the album. I was listening to what felt right to me. I’ve always imagined playing this music in environments that are intentional, slower, and supportive. So I waited for those opportunities to come through. I just played my release show at Pioneer Works, where I recorded the bulk of the album. I had the best time. Pioneer Works has meant so much to me. I recorded my second album there as well as a part of the Clocktower Radio residency. I feel cared for there. My pace is matched.

There’s something very oppositional to hustle culture about not playing shows directly after an album’s release.

I mean, it doesn’t even feel like a choice to me. If I could, I would love to be able to do the hustle thing. But I’ve done it in the past and it was a path of destruction. So I’m trying to allow for slowness and sustainability, which in the immediate can feel a lot less sexy, but I want to be sexy for a long time.

I’m still figuring it out. I feel very green somehow. The last time I spoke to The Creative Independent, I had just opened for Beverly Glenn-Copeland at MoMA PS1. And then Covid hit and I burrowed. Now I’m reemerging after having been in touch with my nervous system. And the nervous system is so bossy if you’re trying to listen to it.

Right, once you’re in a relationship with it.

I know. I want to rebel sometimes, but I just can’t stomach it anymore.

I’m proud of the work, and of this album. I feel like I saw it through, and now it’s about discovering ways of feeding it. I want it to blossom into the many interdisciplinary expressions that are in my mind. And that takes time, it takes intention and commitment.

One thing I’ve been thinking about for myself in regards to slowness and delays that feel out of my own control, and that I can’t overpower internally, is that whatever I’m going through during those times is preparing me to be the person to hold the work.

100%. I think of that a lot. It’s just time for you to be chiseled into the figure that can hold what’s coming.

In one of my favorite songs on the album, “Put Your Faith in God,” it sounds like you’re talking to yourself, about how you used to listen to dance music and now you’re just crying into this microphone. You’re encouraging yourself to try something new, saying, “I mean, it’s not like whatever you’re doing now is working.” I’m curious about that track and that idea, and whether you knew that you wanted to make an album with some joyous or danceable songs.

Yeah, that came from talking. And I’ve been calling the post-album tour my Yap Tour.

I love that.

I didn’t go on tour, but I’ve definitely talked my ass off. I wanted music that felt like it had levity and reached towards ease. I guess all of this is a process of allowing. It’s funny: when you set out to find peace, if you don’t have practice in that, you approach it in a non-peaceful way. For so long I was trying to work to find this peace, but then you realize that it’s just allowing.

I was really struck by that idea of trying the other thing when something is not working. Because I feel this impulse to stay with what feels safe, even if it’s not working.

Definitely. There’s the option of following curiosity into the unknown, or there’s the option of doubling down on what you’ve done before and creating safety that way. And maybe it’s that different seasons call for different approaches or different people are oriented in different ways, and we need all of it.

When we talked last, one thing that was happening in your process was making something that would feel accessible to your family in a way that some of your music hasn’t in the past. I’m curious how that turned out.

It worked. Check.

How’s it feel?

It feels fantastic. I think there’s a romanticization of rebelling into who you are. But there’s actually a fulfillment in coming home… The most avant-garde thing would actually be to bring it back and seek resonance with your roots, I guess.

Are there any artists that are particularly inspiring you right now?

Honestly, I’m really excited by journalists and music writers who are doing their own thing. I think we need new contextualization that’s not owned in order to create a more supportive future.

In terms of artists, I’ve stopped looking at output as much as I have personal infrastructure. American Artist has a show at Pioneer Works called Shaper of God. And oh my goodness, it was amazing. It was inspired by Octavia Butler, and I think it was an example of really prophetic work because the show started right when the devastating fires started in Altadena, and they’re from Altadena. Octavia was making prophetic work, and then they’re making work that aligns with that. That’s when you’re really just following your guidance, whatever you conceptualize guidance to be. That really inspires me, when I see that kind of alignment.

Tell me a little bit more about what “personal infrastructure” means to you.

I guess it’s following your interests to their furthest degree, in whatever way they want to be expressed. And then allowing that to resonate with people, and having that be a way to create creative and intellectual community. I’m really psychedelic this morning.

I love it.

I guess it’s materializing collective consciousness. Putting things out there that resonate with people, and then they get in contact with the material or with you. That’s the dream. And I think that deep roots happen when someone is making from a place of curiosity.

It strikes me as very precious, and a tricky thing to hold onto, to make from a place of curiosity and not feel as much pressure around output.

I guess it’s a hard thing to do. It’s very meditative, and I don’t always do it. I’m just trying to understand how to balance. If you’re committing to being an artist and want it to contribute to your livelihood, you have to have output. So as dreamy as it is to think that way, it’s also like, what’s the moment that you shift? What’s for you? What’s for the world?

The last time we talked, you mentioned that you were working on making the most shameful part of yourself a room. It was about making space for more earnestness, which is how you experience yourself to truly be. I’m curious if the album feels like that room.

Well, earnestness is definitely present. I see it affecting every part of my life. So yes, it did that. And now, ideally, any sort of effort to make space in myself is leading towards a way of serving people. So hopefully that allows other people to access that, if that’s what would help. So long as I can stop myself from hiding.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Janet Frishberg.

Over two dozen disability rights activists were arrested on Capitol Hill last week when they protested the Trump-backed Republican budget bill and its cuts to Medicaid, affordable housing and more. “We’re putting our bodies on the line [because] our bodies are on the line,” says Julie Farrar, an activist with ADAPT, which organized the protest. “It is blood on the hands of the GOP and the president and the administration, that they want this big, beautiful bill for billionaires that will kill poor people [and] disabled people.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Tech writer and critic Paris Marx discusses the first 100 days of the second Trump administration and the influence of billionaire Elon Musk at the helm of the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, which has slashed government programs and the civil service. Marx says even after Musk gave hundreds of millions to Trump’s reelection campaign, “it was hard to imagine that he would really play this outsized role in the actual governance of the country.” Marx also warns that the DOGE playbook is likely to be exported to “the political right in other countries to try to do something similar with a DOGE organization, kind of wrapping it in this cloak of efficiency and … allowing this further gutting of the state.” Marx also talks about how several Canadian tech executives recently launched the initiative called Build Canada, with the goal of firing 100,000 federal government employees, increasing immigration restrictions and building new oil pipelines, and concern about Musk’s DOGE approach going global.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Photo by Nick Fewings

Over the last five or so decades, American elections have become increasingly defined by what they don’t accomplish. The classical liberal model of free and fair elections to select representatives who act in the public interest has been replaced with a rogue foreign policy establishment attached to public – private mechanisms (propaganda, censorship, and surveillance) meant to maintain social control. Rampant slaughter abroad and political repression at home now represent America’s relationship with the world.

In recent history, few Americans recognized the Biden administration’s end run around left politics for what it was. Recall, the left critique of woke ideology isn’t that it is directionally wrong. The critique is that it is misguided politics. Many of us who put the argument forward lived through the creation and long, sad, decline of Affirmative Action. The problem is that the frame of LeBron James being oppressed because he is black, while my neighbor who digs cans out of the garbage to live is privileged because he is white, is flawed.

For those who lived through it, the attack on Affirmative Action came by placing largely contrived, but otherwise representative, accounts of poor and working-class whites being denied opportunities in favor of ‘minorities.’ In fact, large corporations become large by crushing smaller competitors. And with nonexistent economic mobility in the US, the children of the rich inherit social control over the children of working people and the poor. Capitalism is a system of economic domination, not of equitable distribution. Just ask Donald Trump.

The two points made as the national Democrats acted to change the subject from economic maldistribution to identity-based bias were 1) the US has been down this road before, and the strategy that didn’t work was state-sponsored bias remediation and 2) the corporations ‘voluntarily’ launching DEI programs would abandon them the minute that the political tide turned. We can argue theory until we are blue in the face, but it was the left critique that produced the correct prediction about how DEI would be ended.

The broader question of liberal impact has it that income and wealth distribution are as concentrated as they have ever been, racial segregation is today accomplished through economic (class) segregation, and the US is ruled by a small group of oligarchs who use the state to make themselves ever richer. The Democrats have governed through enough of this to have these be their policies as well. Bill Clinton was one of the few Americans who really subscribed to Ronald Reagan’s neoliberal economic vision.

The domestic political result is that the two branches of the uniparty are now dedicated to reversing each other’s policies rather than conducting the people’s business. The way that this currently appears is that the Trump administration is reversing the state mechanisms that facilitated the Democrats’ hold on power 1933 – 1973, aka the New Deal. Through a weak read of history, Donald Trump’s supporters imagine that the gilded age that both branches of the uniparty have spent decades trying to recreate presented opportunities that it didn’t.

In his 1980 contest against Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan presented what is today called neoliberalism as a radical rebuke of state power. His (Reagan’s) project was to shift power from the state that had sponsored the Vietnam War to capital that had supplied ‘us’ with Hula-Hoops and black-and-white televisions. However, in a now disappeared quote. LBJ offered that ‘he can’t end the (Vietnam) war because his friends were making too much money from it.’ This later represented Joe Biden’s explanation of why war in Ukraine and genocide in Gaza are good for the US.

Graph: the bipartisan trend in privatizing Medicare finds recent Democrat and Republican administrations privatizing approximately the same proportions, with 8% going to the recent Democrat and 7% going to the past and current Republican. What swings the balance however (thus far) is that it is the ‘best practices’ provision in the ACA that will lead to the total privatization. The provision gives political hacks working for economic hacks the power to declare privatization a ‘best practice,’ making it official Medicare policy. Source: kff.org.

For those who missed it, Donald Trump hasn’t offered that his policies would benefit ‘us all.’ He has argued that his policies will benefit ‘the worthy.’ This is (Bill) Clintonism 101. Both Clinton and Trump argued that ‘opportunity’ is the best that the state can offer. Bill Clinton asserted that ‘a level playing field’ united the autoworkers who his passage of NAFTA rendered unemployed with Donald Trump, who in the mid-1970s inherited a real estate empire worth about $300 million dollars (inflation adjusted). Both men oversaw the return of income and wealth concentration to gilded age levels.

“True to form, the Social Democrat leaders refused the Communist party’s proposal to form an eleventh-hour coalition against Nazism. As in many other countries past and present, so in Germany, the Social Democrats would sooner ally themselves with the reactionary Right than make common cause with the Reds.” Michael Parenti.

The problem, for those who choose to see it, is that the entire ‘left’ program that was handed to the Democrats in both 2016 and 2020, from Bernie Sanders’ ascendance to the Black Lives Matter protests, is now a flaming bag of dog excrement waiting to be stomped out. The phrase ‘the Democratic party is the graveyard of social movements’ comes to mind. Sure, Donald Trump’s political program certainly gives the US the appearance of a former empire in free-fall. But then so did the DNC propping up Genocide Joe in a low-budget remake of Weekend at Bernie’s.

With Donald Trump throwing policy bombs and lighting fires domestically, the global class war that has been raging for the last fifty years has been brought home. Mr. Trump’s proponents see him, and themselves, on the winning side of history. This is exactly how American Democrats perceived themselves in the aftermath of the 2020 election of Joe Biden. But outside of life and death, history doesn’t have winners and losers. As Bob Dylan put it “… the loser now, will be later to win.’ History isn’t over until it is over.

This is to point to the folly of ideologically driven reforms rather than coming to some level of public agreement, sometimes known as democratic consent, over national governance. The Democrats enacted DEI and the next Republican president reversed it. Donald Trump tears down the permanent government and the Democrats spend the next four years launching foreign wars. That Democrats don’t know that their party is overwhelmingly responsible for privatizing Medicare begs the question of agency?

It is a sense of repeating cycles that replaces one national ideological predisposition with its opposite. But if history has a voice, it ties to underlying causes. The pattern hasn’t been a symmetrical back-and-forth where national balance is recovered. For five decades now, American politics have represented a relentless march to the hard right. No balance has been recovered via the electoral back-and-forth between the parties.

This point is important to understand. Both Democrats and Republicans claim ideologies. That the national politics has moved hard-right for five decades implies either that Republicans have controlled the politics for all five of these decades— which they haven’t, or that both Democrats and Republicans are right-wing parties. Given that the parties have taken turns governing, Republicans haven’t led the move hard-right. The answer that remains is that the Democrats are a hard-right party. As irony has it, neither party would last five minutes without the other.

This may be painful to read inside the sense of emergency being caused by Mr. Trump’s current idiot-King schtick as it is being applied to actual human lives. But Mr. Trump neither caused the dysfunction that brought him to power (twice), nor does he stand any more chance than the Democrats of fixing it. The result is that both parties have migrated from pretending to solve national problems to erasing the efforts of the other party. Mr. Trump is currently winning that effort to the great detriment of the American people.

There was a blood sport of sorts begun in the 1990s of guessing how long it would take various European Social Democratic parties to govern from the neoliberal right after winning election. They would run on the European equivalent of the political marketing campaigns of American Democrats, and then govern from the neoliberal-right upon election. What became apparent was that there were supra-national forces, call them political economy, that converted the wills of disparate electorates into a unified neoliberal front that transcended national borders.

Graph: it’s easy enough for those unfamiliar with the data to associate the large decline in life expectancy with the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. The problem with doing so is that the graph looks largely the same in relative terms, when compared with peer nations. What this suggests is that the Covid-19 pandemic brought-to-light the existing deficiencies of the US healthcare system that were supposed to have been fixed by passage of the ACA. After shoveling billions more dollars in public largesse into health insurer executive bonus pools, the ACA has produced the worst healthcare system in the developed world. Why? Source: worldbank.org.

This paradox, where voters vote but donors control the policies that emerge, represents political disempowerment for all but the rich. With more nuance than yours truly imagined likely, Donald Trump’s targeting of Federal employees has targeted the PMC (professional-managerial class), meaning Democrats, quite effectively. This was Mr. Trump’s variation on Bill Clinton’s use of NAFTA to realign the Democrats with the interests of capital. The class that will remain in the burned-out shell of the US will be the oligarchs.

Key to this effort has been to conflate what politicians say about their policies with what the policies actually accomplish. Remarkably, even as a key provision in the ACA (Affordable Care Act) represents the clearest path for the Trump administration to privatize all of Medicare, Democrats are quadrupling down on their commitment to the program. The ACA provision, called ‘best practices,’ allows one politician in a position of authority to define privatized Medicare (Medicare Advantage) a ‘best practice,’ making it Federal policy to end non-private Medicare.

Graph: after relentlessly criticizing the deportation of immigrants by the Trump administration, Democrats slept through the Biden administration’s massive increase in deportations. The irony is that the Trump campaign spent its prior four years downplaying what the Democrats were doing. It was selling the fantasy of a ‘massive increase in illegal immigration.’ This is why I keep asking my Republican friends why they don’t vote for Democrats? Joe Biden did exactly what they just elected Donald Trump to do. Source: nytimes.com.

As readers certainly know by now, 54% of Medicare (graph below) has already been privatized, mainly by Democrats. The incongruity of Democrats nodding in the affirmative to claims by Democratic politicians that they will ‘save’ Medicare (and Social Security) is perfectly contradicted by the facts. Not only have Democrats privatized more of Medicare than have Republicans, but the ‘best practices’ provision of Obamacare seems designed to privatize all of Medicare. That Democrats don’t know this makes them dangerously misinformed.

In a similar vein, righteous anger over the Trump administration’s violent and likely illegal deportation of Venezuelan citizens who were legally in the US to a gulag in El Salvador is based on ignorance of the actual history of deportations by Presidents. As the graph above illustrates, following the public anguish over Donald Trump’s deportation of immigrants during his first term, the Biden administration doubled the number of deportations. Democrats who oppose the mass deportation of immigrants need to learn at least a few facts about the party that they claim to support.

To possible distinctions between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ deportations, the left has fought capital over open borders for several centuries. Industrialists long fought for open borders so as to flood the US with desperate workers in order to lower wages. The politics that took labor out of consideration is telling. Those who don’t care about labor tend to be aligned with capital. This would be the PMC left, American liberals, and the oligarchs. Having worked white-collar and blue-collar jobs, no working person would voluntarily open the door for their replacement.

While I didn’t participate in the national ‘Hands Offs’ protests, I spoke with friends who attended local events. The local politicians who attended are neoliberal, neoconservative, Zionist, apparatchiks. In a city plagued by FBI efforts to entrap its citizens in fake ‘terrorist’ plots, and that is a dumping ground for state projects that can’t be built elsewhere due to public opposition from powerful forces, the local politicians are aligned with national Democrats against the citizens.

The richest 1% of Americans (the oligarchs) owns over half of the stock market. And the richest 10% owns ninety percent of the stock market. Finance is what empowered the oligarchs. Ending its value could restore something resembling a democratic social order. Note that Democrats have spent the last five decades doing everything in their power to raise the value of the stock market. Bill Clinton was / is a stock market god, having overseen the largest market bubble until the next two market bubbles.

The point is that the stock market is a major source of the oligarch’s power. Letting the stock market fall to valuation levels of earlier stock market history would cut the economic power of the oligarchs down to size. Broadly economically adverse outcomes would accompany the move. But without dampening the economic power of the oligarchs, restoring economic and / or political democracy is impossible. Concentrated wealth will continue to purchase political power until it is made to stop doing so.

The current political lining-up, with Democrats protesting Mr. Trump and his policies under the idea that the next Genocide Joe will be incrementally better than the Republican alternative, misses that the US is an empire in free-fall. The post-War period when the US had the only intact industrial base is long past. The Democrats were urged to put together an industrial policy, and chose not to. This left the Trump – right to inflict its version of an industrial policy. The best guess here is that it will not end well.

Changing economic relations from the bipartisan neoliberal model to something else can proceed from the right or the left. Both the Democrats and the Republicans chose to hand the task to the Trump-right. Please re-read the quote from Michael Parenti above. In extraordinary circumstances, count on the Democrats to side with the right. What the US needs is economic redistribution to accomplish political redistribution. But the American Social Democrats (Democrats) like the current arrangement just fine.

The post Social Democracy isn’t Going to Save the West appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Rob Urie.

Janine Jackson interviewed the Vaccine Education Center’s Paul Offit about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and measles for the April 4, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

AP (2/26/25)

Janine Jackson: Trump-appointed Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy is colorful, which is a problem when someone is a public hazard. Because now that Kennedy is in a position of power, we need journalists to move past anecdote to ideas—ideas that are informing actions that shape not just his reputation, but all of our lives.

Our guest suggests we could begin with a core false notion that lies in back of much of Kennedy’s program.

Paul Offit is director of the Vaccine Education Center, and professor of pediatrics in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. He joins us now by phone from Philly. Welcome to CounterSpin, Paul Offit.

Paul Offit: Thank you.

JJ: The context for our conversation is the first measles death in the US in a decade, in Texas, where we understand they have reported, and this news is fresh, some 400 cases of measles, just between January and March, while the national number for 2024 was 285. This is a tragedy, and a tragically predictable one, due to surges of misinformation around vaccines, around disease and, frankly, around science that have been at work for years, but are turning some kind of corner with the elevation of RFK Jr.

Beyond the Noise (2/11/25)

You identified a keystone belief in Kennedy’s book on Fauci that explains a lot. I would like to ask you to give us some history on that notion, where it falls in terms of the advance of science, and what the implications of such a belief can be.

PO: Sure. So in the mid-1800s, people weren’t really sure about what caused diseases. There were two camps. On the one hand, there were the miasma theory believers. So miasma is just a sort of general notion that there are environmental toxins, initially that were released from garbage rotting on the streets, that caused this bad air, or miasma— kind of a poison, toxin. And so therefore diseases weren’t contagious. You either were exposed to these toxins or you weren’t.

And then, on the other hand, people like Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur were the germ theory believers, that believed that specific germs—as we now know, viruses and bacteria—can cause specific diseases, and that the prevention or treatment of those germs would save your life.

Washington Post (4/7/25)

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. does not believe in the germ theory. I know this sounds fantastic, but if you read his book, The Real Anthony Fauci, on pages 285 to 288, you will see that he does not believe in the germ theory, and everything he says and does now, supports that. His modern-day miasmas are things like vaccines, glyphosate—pesticides—food additives, preservatives: Those are his modern-day miasmas.

So he is a virulent anti-vaccine activist. He thinks that vaccines are poisoning our children. He thinks no vaccine is beneficial. And so everything he says and does comports with that, even with this outbreak now in Texas, it’s spread to 20 states in jurisdictions, he doesn’t really promote the vaccine. Rather, he promotes vitamin A, because he believes that if you’re in a good nutritional state that you will not suffer serious disease. And he still says that, even though that first child death in 20 years, that occurred in West Texas, was in a perfectly healthy child.

JJ: And again, one element of the fallout of this is that he is not just saying, don’t get vaccinated, but saying cod liver oil and vitamin A. And so Texas Public Radio, for one, is reporting kids are now showing up to hospitals with toxic vitamin A levels. So his answer is instead of a vaccine… the response is sending kids to the hospital.

PO: Right. And if you’re a parent, you can see what the seduction is, because here you’re given a choice. He presents it in many ways as a binary choice. You can get a vaccine, which means you’ll be injected, or you’ll inject your child, with three weakened live viruses, or you can take a vitamin. Not surprisingly, people take vitamins, and they take more vitamins and more vitamins, as he sends just shipments of cod liver oil into the area. And so now hospitals are seeing children who have blurred vision, dizziness and liver damage caused by too much vitamin A.

CBS (3/11/25)

JJ: And also, CBS News is having to get hospital officials to contradict just straight-up false comments. The fallout is everywhere. Kennedy is saying, “Oh, the majority of the hospitalized cases in Texas were for quarantine purposes.” And so this person has to say, “Actually, no, no, we’re not hospitalizing people for quarantine. It’s because they need treatment.”

PO: The last place we should quarantine someone, by the way, with measles, is in the hospital. You don’t want measles in the hospital. It’s a highly contagious disease, the most contagious infectious disease.

Also, just one other point is when we say, for example, that the CDC currently states that there are 483 cases in 20 states or jurisdictions, that’s confirmed cases, meaning confirmed by doing antibody testing, or confirmed by PCR analysis, that is the tip of a much bigger iceberg. People who are looking at this, and looking at the doubling time of this particular outbreak throughout the United States, estimate that it’s probably at least 2,000 cases, and maybe more. And the fear is that, given the current doubling times, given that we’re going to be dealing with this virus for at least six more weeks, the fear is that there’ll be another child death or more.

APA (7/1/24)

JJ: You cited a piece in the book where Kennedy says:

Fauci says that vaccines have already saved millions and millions of lives. Most Americans accept the claim as dogma. It will therefore come as a surprise to learn that it is simply untrue.

I think the idea of resisting “dogma” is very appealing to people, because we have seen propaganda efforts, we have seen lies that are en masse, in a way. But I also think that so many folks have, for so long, trafficked in the forms of rational argument without the content, without agreed upon standards of proof, that people are just less able to recognize fallacies, to see when something is anecdotal—not untrue, but anecdotal—and that this impedes our understanding of what public health even is. Misinformation is at the center of this in so many ways.

PO: That’s a really good point. I think we haven’t done a very good job of explaining how science works. I mean, you learn as you go. The Covid pandemic is a perfect example. We were building the plane while it was in the air. There were definitely things that we said and did that were not right over time, but you learn as you go.

And that’s the way science works. I mean, the beauty of science is it’s always self-correcting. It’s introspective, and you’re willing to throw a textbook over your shoulder without a backward glance as you learn new things.

I was a resident training in pediatrics in the late 1970s, the Children’s Hospital in Pittsburgh. I was taught things that were wrong. That’s OK. That didn’t mean the people, the senior pediatricians who taught me, were idiots. It just meant that we got more information over time.

And I think people, at some level, don’t accept that. When you say something that ends up being wrong, “See? You can’t trust them.” And so they throw the whole thing out, to their detriment.

New York Times (3/25/25)

JJ: I mean, yes, it points to a kind of preexisting, if not failure, weakness in media and public conversation about science that makes us poorly set up to engage this kind of thing. But I also think there’s something going on with, you know, Marion Nestle telling the New York Times that she was so excited when Trump used the words “industrial food complex.” She said, “RFK sounds just like me.”

RFK has benefited from a position of a little guy fighting Big Corporate Food, fighting Big Pharma. And I think a lot of folks identify with that. There are things, though, that you’ve talked about that complicate that depiction of him as a little guy going up against well-moneyed interests.

PO: Just the term “Big Pharma” is pejorative. Have pharmaceutical companies acted aggressively or illegally or unethically? Of course they have. I think the opioid epidemic is a perfect example of that. But that doesn’t mean that everything they do is wrong.

For example, I would argue that if pharmaceutical companies were interested in lying about a vaccine, and I’m on the FDA Vaccine Advisory Committee, if they submitted data for licensure or authorization of a vaccine where they lied or misrepresented data or omitted data, they’re going to be found out, because once vaccines are out there, there’s things like the Vaccine Safety Datalink, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. There is no hiding, because we give vaccines to healthy children, and so we hold them to a high standard of safety. So there is no hiding.

And I want RFK Jr. to point to one example where “Big Pharma” has lied to us about a vaccine that’s caused us to suffer harm. Where is that example? But it’s so easy to make that case.

JJ: When it’s presented in this binary way, as though you can be for corporate medicine or corporate food, or you can be against it, and it sort of absents the idea of, “Well, let’s parse what is being said. Let’s talk about these ideas. Let’s talk about standards of proof,” news media that are more interested to present things as “controversial” shut down that more nuanced conversation.

NBC (3/20/25)

PO: Right. I think probably the most depressing email that I got over the past few weeks was from a nurse in Canada, who said that she was seeing parents of a child who was one month old, and she was giving those parents anticipatory guidance about what vaccines that child would get now a month in, it was a two-month-old. And the father said, and I quote, “I’m not anti-vaccine, but I want to wait to see which vaccines RFK Jr. recommends before I get any of them.”

Which tells you how bad this has gotten. I mean that here they want to trust, basically, a personal injury lawyer to determine which vaccines we should get, as compared to the people who sit around the table at the advisory committees at the FDA or CDC.

JJ: NBC News’ Brandy Zadrozny did have a thoughtful piece about employment by anti-vaccine influencers of that horrific death of the 6-year-old in Texas, and how it’s being used to say, “No, we were actually right, because the other children didn’t die.” But there was an immunologist cited in the story who said, “It’s just harder to tell our story, because the story of ‘child does not get disease’ just doesn’t have the media pickup.”

And so it is difficult for journalists to tell a different story about public health when they are so focused on individual cases and that sort of thing. And so there is a problem there in trying to get reporters to tell public health from a different perspective, and make that as compelling as it should be.

Paul Offit: “We’ve eliminated the memory of measles. I think people don’t remember how sick that virus can make you.”

PO: No, you’re right. I think when vaccines work, what happens? Nothing.

But I’m a child of the 1950s. I had measles, and at the time I had measles, there were roughly 48,000 hospitalizations from measles, from severe pneumonia or dehydration or encephalitis, which is infection of the brain. And of those children who got encephalitis, about a quarter would end up blind or deaf, and there were about 500 deaths a year from measles, mostly in healthy children.

But again, not only have we largely eliminated measles from this country, which we did completely, really, by the year 2000, and it’s come back to some extent, because a critical percentage of parents are choosing not to vaccinate their children. But we’ve eliminated the memory of measles. I think people don’t remember how sick that virus can make you. Unfortunately, I think they’re learning now.

JJ: I’ll just ask you, finally, there’s a reason you call your Substack Beyond the Noise. What’s the noise, and what do you hope is beyond it?

PO: The noise is just this torrent of misinformation and disinformation on the internet. I mean, most people get their information from social media, and it’s just like trying to fight against the fire hose of information. And all you can do is the best you can do.

But I think in the end, I think the great educator, sadly, is going to be these viruses or these bacteria, which, if we continue along the path that we’re doing, which is not trusting public health and not trusting that vaccines are safe and effective, and believing a lot of the misinformation online, we’re just going to see more and more of these outbreaks, especially with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of HHS.

MedPage Today (3/14/25)

Look at what’s happened in West Texas. You had this massive outbreak in West Texas. So he then goes on national television and says things like: The measles vaccine kills people every year. The measles vaccine causes blindness and deafness. The measles vaccine causes the same symptoms as measles. Natural measles can protect you against cancer. All of that is wrong.

But the mother of this 6-year-old girl, that perfectly healthy 6-year-old girl who died, said one of the reasons that she didn’t vaccinate was that she thought that the natural infection would protect against cancer, which is something RFK Jr. said that was wrong. So basically, misinformation kills, and I think that until we understand where the best information is, we’re going to continue to suffer this.

JJ: We’ll end it there for now. We’ve been speaking with Paul Offit, who’s director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. His Substack is called Beyond the Noise. Thank you so much, Paul Offit, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

PO: Thank you.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

Image by Nina Zeynep Güle.

“We need clean air, not another billionaire!”

The words slip naturally from my lips, repeated by the crowd outside the Tesla showroom in Manhattan. It’s a go-to chant for Planet Over Profit, the climate justice group I organize with. We want clean air, not wealth inequality, and the two are incompatible.

The action we co-organized on March 8 – in which 6 were arrested for chanting inside the store while over 300 rallied outside – is part of the national #TeslaTakedown campaign, aiming to disrupt Elon Musk’s profits while he guts the federal government in his unelected role leading the new Department of Government Efficiency.

Our action quickly went viral across social media platforms and particularly on X, where dozens of right-wing accounts had a field day with the fact that environmental groups were protesting an electric vehicle company. Many of these comments reaffirmed Musk’s own proclamation that he is doing “more for the environment than any single human on Earth.”

Scrolling through these comments, I was reminded of my family’s own history with Tesla. My father was one of the first thousand people to buy a Model S in the “signature red” exclusive to early buyers. I remember my parents bringing my three siblings and me to a test drive: my mother gasped when my father slammed the gas – no, pedal – and the car shot from 0 to 60 in less than two seconds. The interior was sleek and modern. It was electric.

Like my own family, many wealthy American liberals jumped at the opportunity to buy Teslas and become visible proponents of the clean energy transition. Musk was a darling in Big Tech – after selling PayPal in 2002, he didn’t sit back and enjoy his profits. He kept going, determined to innovate, boasting about his 120-hour work weeks. He seemed like a billionaire who truly cared, who was going to lead us into a green future.

And then, slowly but surely, the great Musk went “crazy,” as so many bumper stickers on Teslas now claim. His biographers debate whether it was stress, mental illness, or rampant drug use driving him mad. Nevertheless, when Musk cozied up to Trump’s side, he was clearly no longer the generous billionaire who would save the planet.

“It was capitalism after all,” Kara Swisher wrote in a March 9 essay for The Atlantic, adapted from her epilogue in Burn Book: A Tech Love Story. She says that Musk and other tech leaders “revealed themselves” in their support of Trump during the 2024 presidential election to want to “reign like kings not just over tech, but over everything everywhere, and all at once.”

But did Musk really “reveal” himself when he came out in support of Trump? The billionaire has behaved like a billionaire for decades: indulging in an environmentally disastrous lifestyle, skirting the law, and clawing for more power. Musk may have been the face of the first electric vehicle company, but he’s done so for profit and power – not our planet.

Musk did not start Tesla; he seized it with money and strong-arm tactics. Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning started Tesla in 2003, and invented the technology behind it – they just needed money. Musk was a risk-taking investor who caught their interest, and subsequently became Tesla’s chairman. But Musk quickly stacked the board with people who shared his belief that innovation should take priority over labor and environmental regulations. In 2007, they voted CEO Eberhard out, who said his ousting felt like “a brick to the side of my head.”

Over the years, Tesla has been fined for violating dozens of labor and environmental regulations, according to a comprehensive report from the Revolving Door Project. From 2014-2018, Tesla accumulated ten times more OSHA violations than its top ten competitors combined, and infamously forced factory employees to return to work during the COVID-19 pandemic. Tesla has settled many lawsuits from employees for severe racial harassment, and Musk is an outspoken critic of workplace unionization.

For a supposedly green company, Tesla’s environmental record is abysmal. Tesla ranks fifth among companies producing the most toxic air pollution nationally. The company’s factory in Fremont, CA, was fined in 2019 for multiple hazardous waste violations and air pollution, and the Austin, TX factory is under criminal investigation for dumping toxic chemicals into the city’s sewers and the nearby Colorado River. Furthermore, the rare minerals required for electric vehicle batteries, including cobalt and lithium, are tied to severe environmental and human rights violations globally.

Musk was never going to save the planet – and neither will any other billionaire. While Musk encourages Americans to buy Teslas, he jets around the world on a private plane. He has claimed climate change alarm is “exaggerated.” He partnered with a coal mining billionaire to elect Trump, and is now working with the latter to gut federal environmental regulations.

Like other billionaires, Musk’s fortune has come at the expense of everyday people, from abusing his employees to calling his opponents criminals. His billions could fund public transportation, housing, healthcare, and education. Instead, he’s taking a chainsaw to all of the government departments which provide those essential services.

That’s why environmentalists are protesting at Tesla – and will continue to do so.

The post Take Telsa Down: A Billionaire Was Never Going to Stop Climate Change appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Sophie Shepherd.

Janine Jackson interviewed Color of Change’s Portia Allen-Kyle about predatory tax preparers for the February 21, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

ProPublica (10/17/19)

Janine Jackson: April is nominally tax season, but right about now is when many people start worrying about it. That’s why TurboTax paid a heck of a lot of money for Super Bowl ads to hard-sell the idea that people could use its service for free—if they hadn’t used it last year, or if they filed by a certain date.

But if free, easy tax-filing is possible, should it be a gift to taxpayers from a for-profit corporation, from a corporation that has already been fined for unfairly charging lower-income Americans, from a corporation that has aggressively lobbied for decades to prevent making tax filing free and/or easy?

Our next guest has looked into not just the top-down inequities of the tax preparation industry—described by one observer as the “wild, wild West”—but how those problems fall hard on Black and brown and low-income communities.

Portia Allen-Kyle is interim executive director at Color of Change. She joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Portia Allen-Kyle.

Portia Allen-Kyle: Thank you so much. Happy to be here.

Color of Change/Better IRS (3/24)

JJ: I want to ask you about the report you authored, called “Preying Preparers.” I believe that many, if not enough, people have a sense that poor, low-income folks are at the sharp end of tax policy generally, and tax-filing specifically—that rich people get to keep, not just more money, but a higher fraction of money than low-income folks, who have less money and who need every nickel of it.

But I’m not sure that people understand, that isn’t just the capitalism chips falling where they may. Your report says, “Exploiting low-income taxpayers is core to the business model of tax prep companies.” Tell us what we might not know about that.

PAK: Doing that report was so eye-opening for so many different reasons, both personally and professionally, at Color of Change, in our advocacy. I remember years ago, when I discovered after going to H&R Block, and paying more than $300 for a fairly simple return, and finding out that the person who filed my return wasn’t even an accountant. And I remember how ripped off I felt.

So fast forward, being in this role and doing this work, and this report in particular, just going into how much of a scam the tax preparation industry is, both the storefront tax prep companies—so your H&R Block, your Liberty Tax, your Jackson Hewitts of the world—as well as large corporations, such as Intuit and other software providers, that provide these tax-filing services.

And the reality of the situation is that you have an industry that has spent hundreds of millions of dollars preventing people from being able to either pay the government what they owe or, in many cases, receive money back from the government that is technically already theirs. They have earned it, the government has kept more of it than they were perhaps entitled to, and now people are in the position for a refund.

And these businesses, especially for Black taxpayers, for low-income taxpayers, have found ways to profit off of people’s already-earned money, by inserting themselves as these corporate middlemen in the tax preparation game, where their sole role is to fleece people’s pockets, either from the money that folks have already earned and they are due as a refund, or by upcharging, upselling and preying upon folks who are eligible for certain tax credits, such as the earned income tax credit or the child tax credit, and have made businesses off of selling the equivalent of payday loan products to these taxpayers, where they take a part of their refund and just give people the rest, under the guise of giving them a same-day advance or same-day loan. And so no matter what the angle is, it is all unnecessary and all a scam. And it’s why government products like IRS Direct File are so important to both our democracy, how government works, and how people receive and keep their money.

JJ: A key fact in your report is that the tax preparation industry has these basic competency problems: Tax laws change all the time. You’re looking for someone who can make sure you pay what you’re supposed to, and look for any benefits you’re entitled to. And, of course, throughout this is that the most vulnerable people are the most in need of this help. But an unacceptable number, if we could say, of these tax preparers are not required to really prove that they know how to do it. That’s an industry-wide failing.

PAK: Oh, absolutely. There are no real requirements for tax preparers in these companies. Whereas if you go to an accountant, accountants have professional standards, they have training requirements. Not anybody can hang up a shingle and say, “I am an accountant,” in the same way that not anyone can walk into a hospital, put on a white coat and say, “I am a doctor.” But what we have is an entire industry of people that are able to say, “I am a tax preparer, because I have applied for a job, maybe taken an internal training to these companies, and am now in the business of selling tax preparation.”

JJ: But not to everyone, because let’s underscore that, the fact that these systemic problems, this is a regulatory problem, clearly, but it doesn’t land on everyone equally, and it’s not designed to. And so in this case, you see that these unregulated tax preparers are taking advantage of, well, the people that it’s easiest to take advantage of. Talk a little bit more about the impacts of that particular kind of predation.

Portia Allen-Kyle: “It’s these tax-lobbying corporations that have fought so hard to keep taxes complicated and confusing for the rest of us.”

PAK: One of the ways in which especially storefront preparers are able to prey on communities is simply by location. And so many of these franchise operations, some of them maintain year-long locations, many of them do not, but they pop up, kind of like Spirit Halloween, often around tax season, in neighborhoods that are disproportionately Black or communities of color, disproportionately lower income, disproportionately taxpayers and residents who are eligible for what are expected to be larger refunds, so those who are eligible for the earned income tax credit, those who are eligible for the child tax credit, and really prey upon those folks in selling tax preparation services.

And the key here is selling tax preparation services, because what they really are are salespeople. They have sales goals, it’s why they’re incentivized to upsell products, some of the products that they’re also selling are refund anticipation loans. So they may lure you in and say, “Get a portion of your refund today,” or “Get an advance upfront.” That’s an unregulated bank product. So you have an unregulated tax preparer now selling you an unregulated loan product, that often sometimes reach interest rates of over 30%. And they know what they’re doing, because that is where they make their money, in the selling of product.

And we see that in the data, that free programs such as VITA, the Volunteer Income Tax Assistance program, disproportionately prepares the taxes of filers who don’t have children, and aren’t eligible for EITC. So many of these companies will refer out other folks, for whom they find that it is not worth it to prepare their taxes, prey on folks that they think they’re getting big refunds, but more importantly, what really illustrates the difference in tax preparation and expectations:  the wealthy millionaires, billionaires, corporations, they’re not going to H&R Block. Mark Cuban is not walking into H&R Block to file his taxes, right?

Folks on the other end of the income and wealth spectrum are relying on accountants, are relying on folks who are not just preparing a service in the moment, but who are providing year-round advice on how to make the system work for them.

And so there’s a service and an additional amount of financial insight and oversight that they are getting, that an entire segment of the market is not, when tax prep is handled in this way. Because, at the end of the day, it’s these tax-lobbying corporations that have fought so hard to keep taxes complicated and confusing for the rest of us, doing this while providing services that they know are subpar in quality, and deliver questionable outcomes. I mean, demonstrated in the report, the error rate of those who prepare taxes for companies like H&R Block, Liberty Tax, Jackson Hewitt and other companies is extremely high, sometimes upwards of 60%. So you have a scenario where you have a portion of taxpayers who disproportionately have their returns prepared by preparers who are unqualified and unregulated, and essentially increases their risk of an audit.

NPR (3/16/23)

And then, when they are audited—it was found that the IRS disproportionately has audited Black taxpayers, and particularly those who are eligible for EITC, etc. And that is not unrelated to the way that it is structured, and the predation of the corporate tax lobby in the first place.

And while it sounds like, when you see advertisements from H&R Block or Intuit about how they stand by and guarantee their services, they’ll defend you in an audit. Well, they need to defend you in an audit. It’s not altruistic. You’ll need that protection, because they’re going to mess it up, and have messed it up, for so many people.

And that part of the story is not often talked about, when we talk about the disproportionate audit rate. It often is not always included how those folks had their returns prepared. And that’s often by these same companies that are presenting and fighting against things like direct file, which is essentially the public option for taxes, in the same way that the Affordable Care Act is the public option for healthcare.

JJ: What is direct file, and why can we expect to hear in the media a lot of folks saying, “Oh, well, you might think direct file is good, but actually…”? What should we know about it?

PAK: What we should know about it is, as I mentioned, direct file is the public option for taxes. And it’s important, because it allows people to file returns, simple returns, directly with the IRS. So last year, the pilot program was only available in 12 states. This year, the program is open to folks living in 25 states. We hope to see and are fighting for the expansion after this season into all 50 states, and recognize the tough road ahead for that.

But it is a program that, in its first year, saved over, I believe it was 130,000 taxpayers, millions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of hours in tax preparation. And already we’ve seen folks flock this season to the direct file system. And in the first two weeks, Color of Change has been doing a lot of advocacy; we are the top referrer of traffic to direct file. And so we’re already saving hundreds of thousands of dollars, and thousands of hours, which is a real benefit to community. This is a system that is government working for you.

It’s also important, because the other thing that private companies have really invested in, and fought so hard about, is that even when you file with H&R Block, when you file with Intuit or TurboTax, when you file with Liberty Tax, that information is still going to the government, to the IRS. But now it also is housed in this private corporation that essentially uses it as a part of their business model, to sell other products to you and prey on you in other ways.

And so it’s not a coincidence that a company like Intuit owns TurboTax, which is a software platform that will take up your data. They also own QuickBooks, so they have a bunch of data on small businesses that keep their accounting in that way. They own MailChimp, and so they have information of millions of folks who join direct marketing email campaigns, and so they can link data in that way. And then they also own Credit Karma. And so for those who are looking to improve their credit scores, for example, they also then have information about Americans in that level. And match this to essentially prey in different ways, with different types of tax products and other banking products.

And we’ve seen this in the expansion of fintech tax product loans that has been going crazy. When Cash App, for example, is telling you that you can file your taxes for free, you should assume that you are the product. And cutting out that corporate middleman is critical and essential, for not just ensuring that families keep money in their pockets, save time, that they are able to put back, spend with their kids, spend with their families, spend pursuing other things, but also is a data protection strategy as well.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Portia Allen-Kyle, interim executive director at Color of Change. The report, “Preying Preparers: How Storefront Tax Preparation Companies Target Low-Income Black and Brown Communities,” can be found at ColorOfChange.org. Portia Allen-Kyle, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

PAK: Thanks for having me.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

Janine Jackson interviewed TLDEF’s Ezra Young about trans rights law for the February 7, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

NBC News (2/4/25)

Janine Jackson: Transgender youth, families and advocates are filing lawsuits, pushing back on Trump executive orders that define sex as biological and “grounded in incontrovertible reality,” and that prohibit federal funding of transition-related healthcare for those under 19, including by medical schools and hospitals that receive federal research or education grants. According to a report by Jo Yurcaba at NBC Out, that latter order contained language claiming that “countless children soon regret that they have been mutilated,” and that they wind up “trapped with lifelong medical complications” and “a losing war with their own bodies.”

This accompanies orders prohibiting trans people from joining the military, and from receiving transition care while incarcerated, and then just yesterday, a move to ban trans women from women’s sports. It’s evident what Trump and his ilk want to do, but is it legal? And even if it’s not, what impacts could it still have?

Ezra Young is a civil rights attorney whose litigation and scholarship center on trans rights. He’s been visiting assistant law professor at Cornell Law School, director of impact litigation at the Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund, and legal director at African American Policy Forum, among other things. He joins us now by phone from Charlottesville, Virginia. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Ezra Young.

Ezra Young: Thank you so much for the invitation.

JJ: Ground us, please, with some basic understanding. Discrimination based on gender identity is illegal. That’s established, isn’t it?

EY: Yes, it is. Gender identity is a newer term, but is essentially equivalent to sex. Federal law prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex, both under our Constitution, as well as under many statutes.

JJ: And it’s also established that the White House or Trump doesn’t have, really, the legal power or the authority to carry out these moves that these orders indicate, right?

EY: Correct. So this is just basic constitutional law, like I would teach my first-year law students; any one of them would be able to spot this. Under our Constitution, our government is one of limited powers. Those powers for the presidency are delineated in Article Two. The responsibility of the US president is to execute and enforce laws that are passed by Congress, not to make up new laws, and most definitely not to infringe upon the rights that are protected by the United States Constitution.

JJ: Right. Well, we know that the law saying they can’t do something doesn’t necessarily mean—we can already see that it hasn’t meant—that nothing happens, including things that can deeply affect people’s lives, even if they aren’t legal. So accepting that grayness, what should we be concerned about here?

Cut (2/4/25)

EY: Well, first and foremost, I’d push back on the sense that there’s grayness. This is a situation where there’s black and white. Our Constitution, which I firmly believe in, enough so that I’m an expert in constitutional law and I teach it, limits what a president can do.

So let me contrast this with the president’s power when it comes to immigration. There’s a lot of power in the president when it comes to immigration, because that’s an issue over which our Constitution gives him power. But our Constitution is one of the government of limited powers, meaning if power isn’t expressly provided via the Constitution, the president can’t just make up that power. So for folks who think the president is doing something unconstitutional, or insists he has powers he doesn’t have, the best thing to do is to push back and say absolutely no.

Part of what we’re seeing right now, with some local hospitals in New York and elsewhere essentially trying to comply in advance, in the hope to appease Trump if one day he does have the power to do what he says he’s doing, that’s absolutely wrongheaded. We don’t, and no one should. That was why our country was founded. Despite all the sins on which it was founded, a good reason why we were founded was to make sure that the people retained the vast majority of the power. And when politicians, including the United States president, pretend they have more power than they do, it’s our responsibility as citizens and residents of this nation to push back and say no.

JJ: I appreciate that, and that the law is not itself vague, but that with folks complying in advance, as you say, and with this just sort of general confusion, we know that a law doesn’t have to actually pass in order for harms to happen, in order for the real world to respond to these calls, as we’re seeing now. So it’s important to distinguish the fact that the law is in opposition to all of this, and yet here we see people already acting as though somehow it were justified or authorized, which is frightening.

EY: It is frightening, and I think, again, that goes to our responsibility as Americans. Citizens or not, if you’re here, you’re an American, and you’re protected by the Constitution. It’s our responsibility to push back people who are all too ready to take steps against the trans community, against trans people, just like all of the other minority groups President Trump is trying to subjugate, and to insist: “Hey, stop. You’re not required to do this. If you’re choosing to do this, that’s a problem.”

JJ: We are seeing resistance, both these lawsuits and protests in the street, I feel like more today than yesterday, and probably more tomorrow than today. Do you think that folks are activated enough, that they see things clearly? What other resistance would you like to see?

Ezra Young: “If Trump were to put out an executive order today declaring the sky is purple, that doesn’t change the reality that the sky is not purple.”

EY: I think protests are a great way for folks who might not know a lot of these issues, or might have limited capacities, so they’re not lawyers, they’re not educators, they’re not doctors, but they’re people who care. That’s a great way to push back, put your name and faith and body on the line, and to show you don’t agree with this.

In addition to that, I would suggest that people read these executive orders and know what they say and know what they don’t say. When I say, right now, for the trans community, complying in advance is one of the biggest problems we’re seeing, I mean it. I’ve been on dozens of calls with members of the trans community, including trans lawyers at large organizations and law firms, people who work for the federal government, who are not what my grandfather would call “using their thinking caps” right now. They’re thinking in a place of fear, and they’re not reading. They’re not thinking critically.

If Trump were to put out an executive order today declaring the sky is purple, that doesn’t change the reality that the sky is not purple. We don’t need to pretend that is the reality. We can just call it out for what it is, utter nonsense.

Beyond that, I would say people should not change anything about the way they live their life or go about the world, simply out of fear that something will be done to them that no one has the power to do.

I can say—it’s kind of funny—I was at a really conservative federal court last year, and I lost my passport. I thought I was going to find it again, but I didn’t, and then I got busy with work, and Trump came into office. So I finally got my stuff together, and applied for a new passport. A lot of people in my community were concerned that I wasn’t going to get a passport, and all I could think was: “I read all of the rules. I read all of the executive orders. There’s nothing that says I can’t get my passport.” I’m not home in Ithaca, New York, right now, but my understanding is my passport was delivered yesterday.

JJ: OK, so just going forward, people think media critics hate journalists, when really we just hate bad journalism, which there has been a fair amount of around trans issues; but there are also some brighter spots and some improvements, like one you saw out of what might seem an unlikely place. Would you tell us a little about that?

North Dakota Monitor (1/28/25)

EY: One of my friends, Brittany Stewart, of an organization called Gender Justice, which is based in Minnesota, brought a lawsuit against the state of North Dakota, challenging a ban on minors accessing trans healthcare. This case was filed about two years ago, and it just went to a bench trial, meaning it was heard by only a judge in North Dakota last week.

Very lucky to the people of North Dakota, there’s a wonderful local journalist by the name of Mary Steurer who has been following the case for the last two years, and attended each and every day of the seven day bench trial. And each day after court, she submitted a story where there were photographs taken straight from the courtroom of the witnesses that were not anonymous, and describing what happened for the day.

And it’s not just passive recording that Mary did; it’s really critical reporting. She picked up on reporting in other states where the same witnesses testified. She shared long summaries of witness testimonies for the day. And my understanding is her reporting was so good that the two other major newspapers in North Dakota ran all of her daily reports on their front pages.

JJ: Yeah, Mary Steurer writes for the North Dakota Monitor. I looked through that reporting on your recommendation, and it really was straightforward, just being there in the room, bringing in relevant information. It just was strange, in a way, how refreshing it was to see such straightforward reporting. She would mention that a certain person made a statement about medical things, and she’d quote it, but then say, “Actually, this is an outlying view in the medical community,” which is relevant background information that another reporter might not have included. So I do want to say, just straightforward reporting can be such sunlight on a story like this.

EY: Yes, and especially I appreciate that Mary is local to North Dakota. She’s not an outsider parachuting in for a trial that might otherwise be overly sensationalized. This is a North Dakotan covering a North Dakota case in Bismarck, and she’s really speaking to the sensibilities of North Dakotans, and what they want to know about a case like this, not what outsiders like me from New York might think.

JJ: Let me just ask you, Ezra, while I have you, forward-looking thoughts. I’ve heard you say these moves are not legal, these executive orders are not legal, they can be stopped, people are engaged in stopping them. Are there things you’d look for journalists to be doing right now, or for other folks to be doing right now, that can make sure that goes forward in the way that we want it to?

EY: For journalists, I’d recommend that you cast a wide net to understand all of the actions that are happening, and all of the lawsuits that are happening. A lot of journalists at the national level, at the very least, do really reactive reporting. So within a few minutes of an executive order coming out, they’ll talk to the same activists that they always talk to on both sides. They’ll talk to a lawyer who has no idea what this area of law is, just to get a quote in, and then they move on.

I think it would be helpful for Americans, and trans Americans especially, to know there’s more going on in our fight than being reactive to nonsense executive orders.

As one example, I filed suit against the US Office of Personnel Management yesterday, on behalf of my client Manning, a former federal employee challenging the federal government’s health benefits plans’ decades-long trans exclusions in healthcare. This is a case that captures the long arc of the struggle for trans rights. It started 10 years ago, and ironically enough, the only administration that was supportive of Mr. Manning’s bid was Mr. Trump.

JJ: That is odd.

EY: But here we are in court again.

JJ: All right then, so cast a wide net, and don’t just look at the most recent thing that’s come down the pike, because that will just have all of our heads spinning, and take our eyes off the prize.

EY: And talk to different voices, not just the same activists, not just the same lawyers, not just the same parents, not just the same kids. There are a lot of trans people. We’re not a monolith. We have different views and interests, and different experiences, and you won’t capture that if you just talk to the same talking heads.

JJ: All right, then. We’ve been speaking with civil rights attorney Ezra Young. You can follow his work at EzraYoung.com. Thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

EY: Thank you so much, Janine.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

But unfortunately for future fire victims, the sole apparent aim of the president’s new policies is to deliver more water to farmers hundreds of miles away from the state’s fire zones.

On his first day as president, Trump issued an executive order that directed his Interior Department to “route more water” to the southern part of the state. Then, on Sunday he issued another order that directed the department to immediately “override” the state’s management of its water, even if it meant overruling California law. The order also suggested Trump could withhold federal wildfire aid if the state failed to comply to his satisfaction.

But the new measures wouldn’t deliver any more water to Los Angeles at all. Instead, his attempt to relax water restrictions would move more water to large farms in the state’s sparsely populated Central Valley, a longtime pet issue for the president, who attempted a similar maneuver during his first term. This time he’s going further, proposing to gut endangered species rules and overrule state policy to deliver a win for the influential farmers who backed all three of his campaigns.

None of this has any relation to wildfires in Los Angeles. For one thing, the city isn’t experiencing a water shortage. It was ferocious, hurricane-force winds that fanned the Palisades and Eaton Fires — not a lack of water to contain the blazes. While some local water tanks in the neighborhood of Pacific Palisades did run out of water, that was only because the city couldn’t pump new supplies up to the hillside neighborhood fast enough to keep up with skyrocketing demand during the fire, not because there wasn’t enough water available to send there.

Even if Los Angeles were low on water, Trump’s executive orders wouldn’t help with that, because the federal government’s canal system doesn’t actually deliver any water to the Los Angeles area. More than 90 percent of that water goes to farms in the Central Valley, with the rest going to far-away cities around San Francisco and Sacramento. All this water is already spoken for, and during dry years the government can’t even fulfill all its existing contracts. The most it can do is potentially ease environmental rules that limit some of the pumping, which farmers have long opposed.

But even some farm advocates are skeptical of the sweeping scope of Trump’s most recent order, and its specious connection to wildfire.

“I am always appreciative of attempts to create more flexibility for moving water around the state, but [federal] water by and large goes to agricultural contractors,” said Alex Biering, the senior policy advocate at the California Farm Bureau Federation, the state’s leading agricultural lobby. “I don’t believe that any amount of additional water coming from the federal project would be able to be applied to stop that fire. It’s an attempt to tie water supply to a natural disaster, but those connections don’t exist in reality.”

Environmental groups, meanwhile, have blasted Trump’s attempt to strongarm California water policy, saying his most recent order would be devastating for the state’s vulnerable fish species — and the integrity of the federal Endangered Species Act as a whole.

“It’s unrecognizable as anything that anybody who knows anything about California water would write,” said Jon Rosenfield, the science director at San Francisco Baykeeper, an environmental nonprofit in the Golden State. “It’s not from this planet.

California’s water system has been the subject of heated political debate for decades. Over the course of the 20th century, the federal government and the state of California built a complex series of dams and canals designed to move water from the northern parts of the state, which see substantial precipitation and snowmelt, down to the agriculture-rich Central Valley and the Los Angeles metropolitan area. The federal government operates dams, canals, and pumping stations that push water south through the valley, and then the state operates the canal that extends down to Los Angeles. The system provides water to around 30 million Californians and irrigates around 4 million acres of the nation’s most productive farmland.

The crux of this transport system is the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, a sensitive marshland region where two of the state’s largest rivers converge and flow out into the San Francisco Bay. This area is also the point where endangered fish species like Chinook salmon enter from the Pacific and swim upstream to spawn. If the federal and state pumps move too much water out of the Delta for farms and cities, they reverse current flows, pulling fish toward their predators or sucking them into the pumps. This is a violation of the Endangered Species Act. One of these vulnerable fish species, the 2-inch gray baitfish known as the Delta smelt, is particularly sensitive to these current changes, and the government often limits its pumping to protect it. 

On Monday night, Trump erroneously claimed in a Truth Social post that he had the military “turn on the water … flowing abundantly from the Pacific Northwest, and beyond” by activating the pumps, which had been offline for a few days for maintenance. The pumped water does not come from the Pacific Northwest, and because the federal government already controls the pumps and uses them all the time, such an action does not require the involvement of the military.

It’s California’s own state-run canal system that actually delivers water to Los Angeles and numerous other cities in Southern California — and the federal government has no jurisdiction over this. The state government curtails these water deliveries somewhat during dry years to maintain a robust supply, and it seldom provides all the water that each city requests. However, deliveries to Los Angeles were typical last year, and reservoir levels in the state are above average. (Furthermore, the Los Angeles metro gets a larger share of its water from other sources, like the Colorado River and the Owens Valley.)

Despite his East Coast upbringing, Donald Trump has fixated on Central Valley water issues for years. He chose David Bernhardt, who has lobbied for the influential Westlands Water District, to lead the Department of the Interior during his first administration. He also hosted multiple rallies in the region during his 2020 campaign, during which he frequently foregrounded water policy. During his appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast last year, then-candidate Trump led the host through a diatribe about water, describing dried-out farmland he saw while traveling through the region with Central Valley members of Congress years earlier.

“We’re driving up, and I had never seen it before,” he said. “I said, ‘Do you have a drought? They said, ‘No … in order to protect a tiny little fish, the water gets routed into the Pacific.’ So I see this, and I said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’”

During his first term, Trump did draft new rules in an attempt to accelerate water deliveries from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. Those rules proposed that pumping should be limited only when smelt-friendly turbid waters are present in the Delta, but they also contained a few provisions that farm groups said led to wasted water during recent wet periods, and failed to prevent salmon death even by their own metrics. After Joe Biden succeeded Trump in office, the Democratic president tweaked those rules in a joint effort with the state of California — and many environmental groups have criticized Biden’s rules as worse for fish than Trump’s.

Trump may go much further this time. His most recent executive order calls for another wholesale rewrite of the pumping rules, proposes building new dams around the state, and even suggests that his administration could declare the Delta smelt functionally extinct. It also proposes to convene the federal committee known colloquially as the “God Squad,” a group of agency heads that can grant exemptions to the Endangered Species Act. This has only happened a few times since the law took effect, but in theory the “God Squad” could allow the government to pump much more water to farms, even if it means jeopardizing the very existence of smelt or salmon runs — or drying out the Delta.

Some of California’s most powerful water districts, which are typically run by large agricultural landowners, have praised the executive order, although they haven’t followed Trump in connecting it to the fires. For instance, the Westlands Water District, which covers more than half a million acres on the west side of the Central Valley, said in a statement that they “welcomed” Trump’s “leadership in addressing the barriers to water delivery.”

But despite the bluster of the White House actions, it’s far from clear that any of these changes will come to pass, at least in the short term. California water is one of the most heavily litigated issues in the United States, and even small tweaks to the state’s pumping system would likely raise legal challenges.

“They can try a lot of this stuff,” said Biering, the California Farm Bureau advocate. “It’s just about: How many times do you want to get sued?”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Trump says he’s sending water to LA. It’s actually going to megafarms. on Jan 28, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Jake Bittle.

I never lived in a huge city. I grew up in Belleville, [Ontario] and when I started coming out here, I would just sit in the grass and chill. I felt like something began to shift in me. Before moving out here, I lived in Ottawa, and felt slightly out of control and wasn’t a settled person. The scenery helps me feel calm. Every once in a while, I enjoy leaving and being in the busy cuckoo stuff.

Every time I go to your place, I have a deep exhale moment. Do you find your environment conducive to making music and art?

The lack of distractions helps. That was something that I struggled with when I was living in Ottawa. As far as distracting cities go, it’s pretty low on the list, but I was always somehow distracted anyway. I’ve definitely made more stuff out here. I also think having a kid has really put my ass in gear because I only have a couple of windows of opportunity when I can get work done.

When is that window?

Gem, my son, just started kindergarten, so I try to get work done when he’s at school. When he first started, I struggled with my sense of purpose. I have this little bit of depression surrounding someone else looking after my baby and me being without him. Challenging myself to write while he’s away has been a good exercise. There’s always the 2 p.m. cutoff time, which gives me a sense of structure.

I know you produce your own music. Can you share your process?

I like to record using my 8-track. I’ll have an idea, grab a guitar or bass, plug right in, and go. Usually, I hear a bass melody and start there. It’s quick and easy, and I’m comfortable with it. After I have a structure, I will take those tracks into the big studio, add drums, and maybe redo vocals. My recording is my writing of the song.

Historically, I’ve worked alone, but I started recently collaborating with my buddy Phil Charbonneau. He has a project called Scattered Clouds and is a really lovely friend and a very interesting musician. I showed him some of the stuff I was working on, and he said, “You should come to my new studio space. I’ve got lots of vintage synths and drum machines.” I’ve wanted this clump of songs to be a bit more synthy, so I went to him and we added some LinnDrum, which is a drum machine that’s really fancy and old. I’d never worked with others, so having someone support an idea was eye-opening. Experiencing someone else’s enthusiasm is so much more fun.

Do you have specific people in your life from whom you ask for feedback?

I like showing songs to Gem. His interpretations and feelings are just so true and blunt. I also always go to my siblings, and that’s really challenging because they never fake their opinions. I think I can often avoid sharing songs because they’re so precious. It’s a tough space.

Do you have any hopes and dreams for Gem’s relationship with music?

He is a very musical little person, but I hope he does whatever it is he wants to do. I just want him to be free, happy—well, maybe not always happy—and confident. He wakes up in the morning and sits in bed, and literally for an hour straight, he’ll sing songs stream-of-consciousness style. He’s so into it and isn’t even necessarily using words. And he’s always had really good rhythm.

What’s his band name again?

Night in the Dark.

How did he come up with that?

He just said it. He’s the best. We record songs together sometimes. I plug him into the 8-track and he’s made some really sweet stuff.

How long have you been working on this recent song clump?

It’s been around two years. I just got into playing with the band I’ve been working with, and the live situation feels so good. Iggy Pop’s album The Idiot was a significant reference for sounds. I’m hoping to record more songs with the live band in mind eventually. It’s totally dependent on grant funding, but that would be a dream.

Do you feel supported by grants?

I am still figuring out how to tap into the grants situation. I’ve gotten a couple over the last few years and traveled to the UK, thanks to Canada Council. I release my records independently, though, and I tend to want to press vinyl, and am stubborn about how I want the songs to come across live, so I play with a band. For example, if there are two guitar parts, we need two guitars… and a synth, and all these expenses can add up quickly. It makes me feel delusional.

Wanting to have vinyl and play with a full band is so normal! The problem is the system, which makes us feel like even the basics are unattainable due to a lack of resources.

Yes, paying a band is really freaking hard when it’s out of your pocket.

It’s brutal —everyone’s juggling side hustles. I know you’re working, too. How do you manage to balance work and music?

My serving job is quite easy for me. I pour people pints; that’s literally it. I feel quite independent in my job setting, and the owners respect me and allow me a lot of freedom in terms of giving me time off to go play shows, which is pretty sweet. That’s the positive to working a serving job.

What parts of your life enter into your lyrics and songwriting?

I actually have many songs about my regulars at work now, and I like to reference mundane, workday things. This community of characters really means a lot to me. In the past, I felt like my writing had always been pretty depressing. I’ll write when I’m in a rut, so much of my music is pretty sad-sack stuff. I feel a little bit self-conscious of that at this point in my life and don’t always want to be like, “woe is me.”

Caylie, your songs are compelling and don’t sound “sad-sack.” One of my favorite lyrics is, “If you’re hearing this, I probably opened for you and I will again and again,” from the song “In Public.” Very relatable and funny to me.

Okay, well that’s good. I try to make them a little bit funny too, because I want to take the piss out of my sad-sack self. That song I wrote when I was listening to a lot of Cate Le Bon. I just picked up a guitar, started playing this funny little riff, and that’s how that started. I was wondering if I could maybe deliver this vocal in a croony way. That was my feeling as I sat and recorded in front of the wood stove on the floor.

Do you think your writing style has changed since Bad Mantras?

Definitely. I also read a lot more now and am a bit more conscious of putting words together. On My Dread I started to come out of my vague writing style. Before then, I’d always written lyrics in an intentionally vague style because I’m self-conscious. Making them less obvious made me feel safer. When it comes to writing lyrics, I go through phases. There’s a certain point in the month when I start thinking differently—maybe it’s when I’m ovulating. It’s like words start entering my mind and I start thinking in a more creative space of my brain. I also took the Adrianne Lenker songwriting course this past winter, which was quite inspiring.

I took it, too! I feel like everyone and their dog took it. It was so beautiful. Did you like it?

Before I started, I felt all this pressure, and I was really stressed out about it. It ended up being so helpful that it became a discipline. I loved having two classes a week and having assignments.

You are planning on releasing music soon. What is your current mind state pre-release?

I still have this feeling that it is incomplete, which is a struggle. It’s been so long now since I made it that I’ve listened to these few damn songs thousands of times. It’s making me fucking crazy. The only thing I can do now is give them away.

Because you’re not attached to a label, do you feel free to release things according to your own terms?

I feel lucky in that I make stuff when I want to, and there’s literally no pressure from anyone aside from myself. At the same time, if anyone wanted to put my record out ever, sick.

Is there any question that you have always wanted to be asked and never have been?

I don’t know. I like being asked how I am.

How are you, Caylie?

Now? I’m really great.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Lauren Spear.

This story describes an alleged sexual assault and serious injuries resulting from it.

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the Anchorage Daily News. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

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The sexual assault case was one of the most horrendous that two Alaska Superior Court judges said they had encountered in their long careers on the bench. The victim suffered internal injuries that required surgery and the use of a bag for her digestive system.

“Even somebody like me, who does nothing but this work for so long, still has their sensibility shocked,” Judge Philip Volland said at an early bail hearing, warning that he worried the suspect might try to threaten the woman. “The facts of this case tell me there is a very, very real risk of intimidation of the victim. If she wasn’t afraid then, she should be afraid now.”

Detectives had interviewed the alleged victim, executed search warrants and, two weeks after the reported incident, arrested a suspect: then-38-year-old Lafi “Beago” Faualo, who pleaded not guilty to first-degree sexual assault.

That was a decade ago. The case has still not gone to trial.

Over the years, the state assigned the case to four different judges, including Volland, who between them agreed to delay the trial more than 70 times — usually at the request of the defense attorney. Such delays and judges’ acquiescence have become routine in Alaska, robbing victims of timely justice and sometimes eroding the prosecution’s ability to mount an effective case using eyewitness testimony.

A spokesperson for the court system said the state is taking steps to reduce the length of time it takes to resolve Alaska criminal cases, including providing new training for judges and issuing orders to limit delays.

In the neverending case of sexual assault against Faualo, it all began with an alleged attack on July 16, 2014, in a van parked outside an Anchorage church. According to the charges, Faualo was in the back seat with the victim during the incident. Prosecutors additionally accused a second man, who was in the driver’s seat, of sexual assault in the case but later dropped the charges when the man pleaded guilty to coercion.

According to a charging document, Faualo denied sexually assaulting the woman but told Anchorage police he might have “accidentally” put his hand in her anus. The report quotes Faualo saying he might have used a bottle, but then saying it was definitely his hand. Faualo’s defense attorney has since said that Faualo’s co-defendant — who has since died — was the one who committed the assault and not Faualo.

ProPublica and the Anchorage Daily News obtained audio recordings and logs from each hearing or listened to it live. Nearly every time the defense attorney asked to delay the trial, a judge agreed. Not once did anyone in the courtroom ask what the victim wanted.

Faualo did not respond to an interview request and did not respond to emailed and hand-delivered questions.

Here’s how an Alaska sexual assault defendant has been able to prevent his case from going to trial since 2014. Prosecutors typically raised no objection to the delays. Unless noted, the judge granted the defense request for a delay in every instance.

• Sept. 25, 2014: Faualo has hired a private attorney, Rex Butler, who asks to delay the hearing.
• Oct. 7, 2014: Judge Philip Volland agrees to a delay because the defense attorney says he is still new to the case.
• Nov. 4, 2014: The judge grants the defense a three-week delay.
• Nov. 25, 2014: The judge delays the case as Faualo’s co-defendant considers a plea deal.
• Dec. 9, 2014: The defense attorney has a scheduling conflict, delaying the case.
• Jan. 13, 2015: Faualo files a motion to suppress evidence, delaying the case for months.

By 2015, the case has stretched past the state’s 120-day speedy-trial deadline. With no trial date in sight, Faualo asks to be released on bail, but the prosecutor claims he is a flight risk and a threat to the victim. The judge denies the bail request. The stakes are high. If convicted, Faualo faces a minimum of 25 years in prison for one count of sexual assault that resulted in serious injury, plus additional time for each of three additional counts of sexual assault.

• April 7, 2015: The defense asks for another delay.
• July 7, 2015: The judge grants a two-week delay, no questions asked.
• Aug. 18, 2015: Judge Michael Wolverton has been assigned to the case. He approves another delay.
• Aug. 26, 2015: The judge delays the trial to November 2015.
• Oct. 14, 2015: The judge agrees to another delay.
• Nov. 18, 2015: The judge delays the case another 35 days.
• Dec. 9, 2015: The first motion to suppress evidence fails, and the judge agrees to another delay.
• Jan. 20, 2016: The defense asks for a 30-day delay.
• Feb. 17, 2016: The state has offered a plea deal. The defense asks for a 30-day delay.
• Mar. 16, 2016: The defendant hasn’t decided on the plea deal and asks for another monthlong delay.
• April 20, 2016: The defense files another motion and asks for a 30-day delay.
• May 18, 2016: The judge agrees to delay the case for another month.
• June 15, 2016: With a new prosecutor assigned to the case, the defense again asks for a 30-day delay.
• July 13, 2016: The defendant is considering a plea deal that has been offered; the prosecutor asks for a two-week delay.
• July 27, 2016: The defendant hasn’t decided on whether to take the deal. The judge delays the trial by six weeks.

By now, the delays in the case mostly revolve around motions filed by the defense to throw out evidence collected by detectives early in the investigation. For example, Faualo’s lawyer says police served a search warrant too late at night — despite the warrant saying it could be served at any time. Meanwhile, Faualo’s co-defendant has agreed to a plea deal and is expected to testify against him at trial.

• Oct. 12, 2016: The defense asks for a one-month delay to continue negotiating a deal.
• Nov. 16, 2016: The judge agrees to the defendant’s request for another one-month delay.
• Dec. 14, 2016: The judge delays the case a month to make time for an evidentiary hearing.
• Feb. 8, 2017: The judge denies the defense’s motions to suppress evidence, and the defense asks for another three-week delay.
• Mar. 8, 2017: Faualo’s lawyer tells the judge he will “try to get” the case resolved soon but asks to delay the trial two months.
• May 17, 2017: The defense asks to delay the trial by one month to negotiate a deal.
• July 5, 2017: The defense asks for another one-month delay to continue negotiating.
• Aug. 2, 2017: The defense says they’re “very close” to making a plea deal and just need to delay proceedings by another two weeks.
• Aug. 16, 2017: Still negotiating, the defense says, asking for another two-week delay.
• Aug. 30, 2017: The defense says it needs a three-week delay to continue negotiating.
• Sept. 27, 2017: “Give us two more weeks,” the defense attorney asks. The judge OKs the delay.
• Oct. 11, 2017: The defense is “pretty close” to a plea deal but needs a two-week delay.
• Nov. 1, 2017: The defense asks for a one-month delay — long enough “so we don’t come back in two weeks and not have an answer.”
• Dec. 6, 2017: The defense asks for a one-month delay. The judge agrees without asking questions.
• Jan. 10, 2018: The defense says the two sides are “close to resolving” negotiations but need a two-week delay.
• Jan. 24, 2018: The judge delays the trial to allow more negotiations.
• Feb. 14, 2018: The defense asks for a new three-week delay without explanation. The judge agrees.
• Mar. 7, 2018: A new prosecutor takes over the case; the defense attorney asks for a two-week delay.
• Mar. 21, 2018: The defense asks for a one-week delay to negotiate.
• Mar. 28, 2018: The defense asks for two more weeks to negotiate.
• May 2, 2018: The defense attorney asks to delay the trial until October.

Prosecutors often say that trial delays make it harder to win a conviction because witnesses’ and police officers’ memories fade over time.

“Without question, the delay that occurs in cases going to trial makes it more difficult to keep track of where victims and witnesses are,” said Alaska Deputy Attorney General John Skidmore. “Police officers retire, move out of state. Lab analysts leave.”

“All of our cases depend upon us being able to present the evidence, and it’s just a fact of life that as time progresses, life moves on,” he said.

• Sept. 5, 2018: The defense asks for a one-month delay.
• Oct. 3, 2018: The defense asks for a two-week delay.
• Oct. 17, 2018: The judge agrees to delay the trial for two weeks for “attorney negotiations.”
• Nov. 28, 2018: Faualo has a new public defender, who asks to delay a week to prepare.
• Dec. 12, 2018: The public defender asks to delay again.
• Feb. 6, 2019: Butler, the private defense attorney, returns. He requests a delay until September.

Nothing happens in the case for seven months because Faualo’s attorney says he doesn’t have time for the trial. Faualo has now been in jail for five years, but the case appears to finally be destined for trial when a judge sets a new date for November 2019.

• Oct. 28, 2019: The defense attorney asks to delay the trial one month.

The 2019 trial date comes and goes, and Wolverton has now retired. At a spring hearing held before Judge Catherine Easter, the defense attorney says he’s once again considering a plea deal rather than a trial. The judge chuckles when she reads the case number, which shows it has been awaiting trial since 2014. When the defense asks for a delay, the prosecution objects.

Because of the age of the case, the judge sets a trial date. But soon after, the COVID-19 pandemic pauses jury trials across Alaska.

• May 11, 2020: COVID-related delay.
• June, 11, 2020: COVID-related delay.
• Oct. 27, 2020: COVID-related delay.
• Jan. 12, 2021: COVID-related delay.
• Mar. 9, 2021: COVID-related delay.
• June 17, 2021: COVID-related delay.
• Aug. 16, 2021: The defense asks for a delay to negotiate a deal. Judge Erin Marston, the latest judge assigned to the case, agrees.
• Oct. 26, 2021: A new prosecutor is assigned to the case and asks for a delay.
• Nov. 24, 2021: The defense requests a delay.
• Jan. 5, 2022: Jury trials have resumed across Alaska, but both sides in this case ask for a delay.
• May 9, 2022: The prosecutor says she’s ready for trial. The defense wants a delay.
• June 10, 2022: The defense asks for a 30-day delay to continue negotiations.
• July 14, 2022: The judge delays a hearing a week. The prosecutor doesn’t show up to the new hearing, so the judge delays again.
• July 26, 2022: The defense asks for a delay due to a scheduling conflict.
• Sept. 9, 2022: The prosecutor asks the judge to delay the case for “one last status hearing.”

The only witness to the alleged assault, other than the victim, has now died, the defense attorney says. Faualo has been in jail for eight years, and the judge agrees to release him on bail. His daughters will be asked to watch him and report to police if he violates conditions of his release.

• Nov. 28, 2022: “I know it’s an old case,” the defense attorney acknowledges while asking that the trial be delayed several more months.
• Feb. 1, 2023: The defense asks for a delay of 45 days.
• Mar. 15, 2023: The defense requests a delay. A new judge assigned to the case, Judge Andrew Peterson, agrees.
• April 26, 2023: The defense asks to delay a trial until 2024.

The talk of trial dates pauses for a few months as Faualo’s lawyer works, successfully, to loosen bail restrictions. At a bail hearing, a judge confuses Faualo with the codefendant who pleaded guilty to lesser charges. Misunderstanding the severity of the charges against Faualo, the judge agrees to ease up on his bail conditions. Faualo is now allowed to leave his house during the day.

• Nov. 15, 2023: The defense asks for a 30-day delay.
• Dec. 13, 2023: The prosecutor wants time to negotiate. She asks for a 30-60 day delay.

It’s now been nearly 10 years since the alleged sexual assault. Having failed to reach a plea agreement, the two sides say the earliest they can appear at trial is October 2024.

• Aug. 30, 2024: With the trial set for October, the defense asks for a 15-day delay.
• Sept. 25, 2024: The defense requests a 30-day delay.
• Oct. 30, 2024: The prosecutor is ready. But the trial is delayed again because Faualo’s lawyer had double-booked himself for two trials at the same time.
• Nov. 27, 2024: The prosecutor and defense are supposed to select a trial date, but the defense isn’t ready. The judge delays the case again.

The most recent hearing in this case was held on Dec. 16, 2024, when Judge Andrew Peterson set a trial date for June 2025, 10 years and 11 months after the alleged sexual assault took place.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by .

Dalon has been fighting to stop the mine for most of her life. Today she writes and organizes to stop the project. ”We will realize our right to practice self-determination,” she said.

A new report from Global Witness, an international human rights advocacy group, says that increasing demand for transition minerals necessary for green energy are putting Indigenous peoples, like the Lumad, as well as critical biodiversity in the Philippines, at risk. More than a quarter of lands in the Philippines identified for mineral mining overlap with biodiversity hotspots while nearly half of all mining permits issued by the state “clash” with important ecological zones. Since 2010, Global Witness estimates that nearly 800 miles of critical forest lands have been lost to mining – an area around three times the size of New York City.

Hannah Hindstrom, a senior investigator at Global Witness, says that a fifth of the land in the Philippines is already covered in mining leases. “It’s quite a shocking figure. It’s a heavily mineral-developed country,” she said. “The Government has strongly signaled that it is open for business in the mining sector and they are trying to position the country as a leading producer of transition minerals.”

The Philippines is one of the most mineral rich countries in the world, and is the second largest global producer of nickel. It’s estimated that only 5 percent of the nation’s 1 trillion dollars worth of minerals has been explored. As the world moves from fossil fuels to green energy solutions, like electric vehicles, minerals including nickel, copper, gold and silver are critical to building energy infrastructure and the Philippines is positioning itself to be a major economic player in the global mining industry. It’s estimated that by 2040, the global need for renewable energy will increase seven-fold.

But that move away from fossil fuels has put Indigenous peoples at the frontlines of land theft and business-driven violence. The United Nations Peoples Forum on Indigenous Issues has made many recommendations over the years, repeatedly pointing out that clean energy projects impede on Indigenous peoples’ right to free, prior and informed consent, as outlined in the United Nations Declaration on the Roghts of Indigenous Peoples. As well, Indigenous experts and advocates have called carbon markets “false climate solutions” and encourage countries to instead entrust land stewardship to Indigenous communities who have done so to great success for thousands of years. 

In 1997, the Philippines passed the Indigenous Peoples Rights Act. The act, which is aimed to protect ancestral, Indigenous lands, has provided Indigenous peoples land titles to nearly 5 million hectares of homelands since 2020. But it’s an expensive and lengthy process that has taken as long as 20 years to complete, and an estimated 80 applications are still waiting to be processed. Because of the bureaucratic burden, Indigenous peoples have accused the government of undermining and manipulating the process to further extractive business interests. The Department of Environment and Natural Resources, or DENR, in the Philippines is looking at shortening the mineral leasing time from six years, to one year. According to Global Witness, since the 1990’s, Indigenous peoples have lost around 60,000 square miles, an area roughly the size of the state of Georgia. 

That development has put many Indigenous people face-to-face with violence. In the last decade, one-third of environmental land defenders killed in the Philippines were Indigenous, and nearly half of those cases were associated with mining. Hindstrom said that the country is consistently ranked as one of the most dangerous in Asia for environmental land defenders. “Where there was a high rate of overlap between mining and Indigenous land, there’s also a high rate of killings of Indigenous defenders and especially, obviously, anti-mining defenders.” 

Global Witness reports that the Filipino military, which is mandated to protect state resources, have close ties to mining operations and are linked to around half of the killings of Indigenous land defenders. 

Kat Dalon says that if small-scale mining could help benefit the country, Sabokahan Youth would support it. She says as long as everyone is able to feed their families, protect the land, and share harvests, there may be a different conversation–but that’s not what’s happening now. 

“The point,” she said, “is that our lands, and what happens to it below and above the soil, should be under our self determination as its stewards.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The Philippines is going all-in on transition minerals and endangering Indigenous lands on Dec 9, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Taylar Dawn Stagner.

Janine Jackson: Among other happenings on November 5, Missouri narrowly passed a ballot measure that will legalize sports gambling in the state. Like similar measures in other states, Amendment Two came with a lot of promises and perhaps not-deep-enough questions, as our guest explored in a timely report.

Journalist Amos Barshad is senior enterprise reporter for the Lever, online at LeverNews.com, and author of the book No One Man Should Have All That Power: How Rasputins Manipulate the World, from Abrams Press. He joins us now by phone from here in New York City. Welcome to CounterSpin, Amos Barshad.

Missouri Independent (10/29/24)

Amos Barshad: Thank you so much for having me.

JJ: So “ballot measure” sounds very bottom-up, but Amendment Two did not arise, as it were, organically from the community. Who did you find to be the driving forces behind it?

AB: Yeah, we found that backers of the ballot measure were the two big sports gambling companies, FanDuel and DraftKings, which are national corporations that probably a lot of people are familiar with through their advertising. And they allied with the professional sports teams in Missouri; there’s six of them. And everyone got together to push forward this ballot measure. I don’t know what the final number was; at least something like $36 million was spent backing this ballot measure.

JJ: We should take a minute to note that there’s a relevant Supreme Court ruling from 2018 that opened the floodgates to states doing this legalizing of sports gambling, right? Essentially, there was a law on the books, and it got taken off.

AB: That’s right, yeah. So the 2018 Supreme Court decision opened the door for states to make their own decisions on sports gambling. And very quickly, many states legalized; so we were up to 38 as of this year before November, and then Missouri did become the 39th state.

JJ: Now, there’s a sort of a blueprint that the industry uses, and it seems to be working. There’s kind of a template that’s gone from one state to another, right? Can you talk about that?

Amos Barshad: “The industry makes these promises that they can’t keep. They’re telling you that this will solve your issues, but it’s not true.”

AB: Yeah, so what we’ve found through our reporting is that the industry often makes promises that the tax revenue from sports gambling will go to causes that most people could get behind. So in Missouri, specifically, it was education, the public school system, money for teachers, money for kids in the public school system. And that’s common, I think a lot of people would maybe know that a lot of state lotteries allocate money for education.

From there, we found that it gets a little bit more cynical, for two reasons. Specifically in Missouri, the critics, the group that was opposing this ballot measure, made the compelling argument that there isn’t that much guaranteed money going to education, that the way the rule was written both creates carve-outs for the gambling companies to actually not pay quite as much in taxes as it might seem. Plus, then from there, there’s not even a direct conduit created so the money will go to education.

Yeah, that’s kind of been, like you said, the blueprint. So we looked at other states, and it seems like, for example, in Colorado, which faces drought via climate change, the money will be earmarked to address water scarcity; Washington, DC, parents faced really high family expenses, so the promise is with funding for childcare. And it’s almost like they’re engineering the end result; they’re saying, we can fix your problem.

And in California, which voted down a legalized sports gambling ballot measure in 2022, the money would have gone to try to alleviate the homelessness crisis. But, basically, the groups opposing that were able to effectively communicate that the industry makes these promises that they can’t keep. They’re telling you that this will solve your issues, but it’s not true.

Kansas City Star (11/6/24)

JJ: And I wanted to ask you a little more about what we do know about that track record, but I just wanted to point out that in this piece in the Kansas City Star from November 6, it says:

A fiscal note attached to the measure estimated that the state revenue generated from legalized sports betting would range from nothing to $28.9 million each year. But the campaign argued those figures would be much higher.

Well, yeah, higher than nothing would be great, but, I mean, this is even, in the measure itself, it doesn’t sound like a promise.

AB: Yeah, exactly. It’s really interesting, because whatever any given voter’s personal opinion on sports gambling is, you can then go from, “OK, but we should write the legislation to ensure that the promises that are being made are being kept.”

And, basically, part of the reason why that minimum could be zero is because of this carve-out that the industry has successfully pushed for in state after state, which is that they can use their promotional spending against their tax bill, basically, which means the money that they use to lure in new gamblers. And it’s a whole big conversation about issues with sports gambling, where that, again, it gets pretty cynical, and that’s money basically spent on luring in, say, problem gamblers, people with gambling addiction issues. So they’re using that money, money that’s spent trying to hook new gamblers, and that not only maybe exacerbates the situation for any given person gambling too much, that can go into debt, create personal problems in their life, but then they get to deduct that from the tax bill. So, yeah.

JJ: So we have at least 38 sort of case studies, and it sounds as though you’ve said it, but can we say that there’s not a strong track record here in terms of sports betting filling budget holes in any meaningful way?

AB: It’s an interesting question, because, again, you can go state by state. So in the state of New York, they were able to push for a 51% tax rate, which is, as it sounds, extremely high, that’s the highest in the nation. There’s a few other states that have it at that rate as well, and they have been able to collect significant funds, and in New York state, that goes to education as well.

But it’s interesting, even there, there’s legislators that are friendly to the industry, that have tried to claw back, lower that tax rate, actually have tried to introduce that same carve-out where the gambling companies get to use the promotional spending to deduct from the tax bill.

And then in the other states, it can be 10%. I think that’s the tax rate in Missouri, a lot of the other states are set at 10%, and, yeah, it doesn’t become a significant enough source of funding to ameliorate all the issues that are then caused from legalized sports gambling. And I think the other point on that is: Education costs go up. These big issues costs go up, year after year. But is the revenue from the gambling going up year after year? It seems that that’s not necessarily the case.

JJ: You have a fact in the piece that says, “in the run up to the 2023 Super Bowl, Kansans bet $194 million, from which the state of Kansas raked in $1,134.” That is not impressive.

AB: It’s a stark figure, and that’s all about that carve-out that I mentioned. All that money, a lot of it was promotional money for their “free” app. What actually happens is, they get you onto their app; once you’re on there, it says, “Oh, you have to spend this $5 by a certain time.” So these gambling companies are extremely good at getting people onto the apps, and getting them to spend more than they necessarily intended to. And you hear, “Here’s a free $5 bet,” but from there, you have to spend a certain amount of money within a certain amount of time to cash in on the offers. So as you can see, a particularly egregious example, but you’re talking about a ton of money being spent, and the end result is not what would seem to be the correct amount of correlating tax revenue for the state.

Lever (10/24/24)

JJ: The piece starts with a photo op in which the mascots from Missouri’s professional sports teams delivered boxes of signatures in support of Amendment Two to the secretary of state’s office.

AB: [Laughs]

JJ: Very cute. What is in it for the teams? What do the teams see that made them put millions and millions of dollars into this?

AB: Historically, the professional sports teams in America were against legalized sports gambling, for probably reasons you’d expect, feeling that it would corrupt the sport in ways. We’re probably all familiar with certain scandals over the history of American professional sports in the 20th century, most famously Pete Rose, the baseball player. The idea that maybe once you legalized, you incentivize more gambling, that players would have reasons to throw games, or affect what’s happening on the field because of gambling interests.

But, basically, once the 2018 Supreme Court decision came out, once they saw just how much money was there to make, sports teams in America did a complete 180, and are all behind this.

And they’re not directly collecting money, there’s not anything written into the law where they get a certain percentage of the amount that’s gambled. But what ends up happening is, with these sports gambling companies, they have so much money to spend, and they end up spending it through the sports teams. They might set up by advertising inside the stadium, or during the broadcast of the team’s games. They might even set up booths inside the stadium, so they have to pay teams for the right to do that. The teams know that if gambling is legalized in their state, that their marketing revenue is going to go up a certain amount.

Reuters (7/3/24)

JJ: Another interesting part of this very interesting piece is FanDuel, their parent company, called Flutter, they operate in the UK, that’s where they started, but they have different rules about just the kinds of things that you’ve been talking about over there, don’t they?

AB: Yeah, and I think that’s really an important part of everything, because, again, any given person might think about sports gambling, and the legalization of it, and say: “It does exist in other states or other countries. Is it really so bad?” And I think that the counterargument would really be to look at the regulation that is happening in other countries.

Specifically in the UK, it’s actually been about 20 years since this kind of online mobile betting took off. And what critics say is that it took decades of families being ruined, individual lives being ruined through gambling debts, for really good regulation to come, in which gambling companies are legally obligated to make sure that the people betting aren’t betting beyond their means, and that they aren’t exhibiting problem gambling behaviors. And in the US, because this is relatively new, that regulation just doesn’t exist.

So you could say, OK, I believe in legalized sports gambling, I want the tax revenue to come in. But from there, you’ve got to think, what is the impact on people? What is actually going to happen next? And you can see, where sports gambling is legal, there is a spike in addiction, and issues of that nature. And so the question is, are we just going to let companies write the rule book, or is there common-sense regulation that could come in that would really save a lot of people?

Forbes (10/17/23)

JJ: I do see in the writeups from Missouri and other states, there’s kind of an offhand reference to, oh yeah, some of the revenue has to go to this fund to combat problem gambling, or something. But it is very vague.

AB: So it’s basically, anytime a state legalizes sports gambling, it will also either indicate that a certain amount of money is going to go to a preexisting state problem-gambling fund, or create a whole new one. So it’s very much, we are aware that these issues are going to come in, and we’re going to try to tackle them.

What I tried to point out in the piece is that there isn’t some sense that we’re going to prevent people from becoming addicts in the first place. We’re just going to be there to treat them after they become addicts. And I think we can see the obvious issue there, to accept the fact that harm is going to happen on a large public scale, and then say, “And then we’ll deal with it,” is not ever going to be as effective as trying to make sure that that harm doesn’t take place in the first place.

JJ: There is, as you’ve been discussing, a real incentive system to keep people betting, but right now this is still betting on actual games that actually happen. But some folks see a slippery slope. Talk about iGaming.

AB: iGaming is the industry-preferred term for any kind of casino game that we might be familiar with, probably most famously slots. And you could just basically play a digital version of that on your phone. But it just creates an endless variety of options for people to gamble on. It’s legal in some states, and the push is to continue legalizing it, and it’s basically much more lucrative because people lose more money playing it.

And the way that it’s set up, the way that certain games are created, for example, you could play multiple hands of blackjack. There’s one infamous game that you’re basically betting on watching a little cartoon rocket go up, and you’re trying to guess when the rocket will explode. So it’s almost cutesy, children’s entertainment almost, but people are spending real money and losing real money playing these games.

CNBC (9/13/24)

Again, it goes back to the idea of regulation. What are we going to allow people to bet on, as far as knowing that if they get hooked on these games, that it could damage their lives? I think with the iGaming, the way that some critics of the industry have talked about it, is that this sports gambling wave was always the prelude to this next phase, this iGaming phase. And when you think about it that way, yeah, it can feel a bit alarming that there isn’t any kind of organized pushback on a national level, because I think that’s what we’re talking about.

As we mentioned, it has passed in Missouri, and looking at the last few states left in the country, there’s good reason to think that they’ll get up to or close to having sports gambling be legal in every state in the country. You just have to wait and see. But I think the question is from there, then, that obviously indicates the need for a national response. And there are, Rep. Paul Tonko, congressman from the state of New York, he has introduced a bill called the SAFE Bet Act, and this is the first attempt to create restrictions, to create protections, to push back on gambling companies, who currently have a complete green light to do what they want.

JJ: Finally, it was a very tight race. Amendment Two passed by something like half a percentage point in Missouri, and we should understand that in the context that there were all these major sports teams, and millions and millions of dollars, supporting it. So there are a lot of people, it seems, who are concerned about this, who are pushing back on this. There’s a constituency there to stay in conversation with, it seems. I just wonder what you would like to see, along with the regulation from the state and perhaps from the federal level, what would you like to see in terms of reporting, follow-up reporting, on this incredibly impactful and interesting issue?

AB: As we talked about, all this has only been legal since 2018, so the data that has come in since then is starting to indicate the exact severity of the problem, and I think we’re just only going to see more of that. We’re going to have more hard numbers on what this is actually doing to people. There has been and continues to be great reporting on this and, yeah, definitely would just love to see more of that. We can really quantify this and say, OK, sports gambling would come in, here’s the amount of tax revenue that is created, and here’s the corresponding issues that it’s led to. And I think if you look at it in that way, here’s the black and white, and people can make informed decisions on where they stand on it, rather than, like we spoke about, being swayed by the funny mascots running around pushing it, their beloved sports teams pushing it, or being told that money is going to go to education. You can divorce yourself from the sales pitch and say, “OK, what’s the reality?” The numbers are all going to be there.

JJ: All right then; we’ve been speaking with Amos Barshad. You can find the article “The Gambling Industry’s Cynical Play for Your Vote” at LeverNews.com. Thank you so much, Amos Barshad, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

AB: Thank you.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

I worked as a professional DJ my entire adult life starting from when I was 21, and I had done freelance music criticism. I wasn’t particularly prolific, but it was something I was always interested in, and I consumed a lot of music criticism. When the pandemic hit, my DJ career collapsed completely. I lost all my work, and my whole career basically vaporized.

I had the thought of, “Should I start a podcast,” but who hasn’t had that thought? I would spend some time daily poking around in the New York Times Popcast’s Facebook group, and I’d had this idea of a system of tiers. It was just something I like to debate with my friends: “If there’s tiers of pop stardom, who’s in that top tier?” One day in the Facebook group, I posted that. It sparked a huge debate that went on for days, and it got hundreds of comments, and I realized there was something there that people really liked talking about.

I can’t remember exactly how I went from that to, “Let me actually turn this into a podcast,” but it just connected, and pretty soon afterward, I decided to start the show. It was a combination of stumbling into a conceit that had an angle and a construct to it and me just stumbling around, feeling really lost, looking for what the next thing would be, and knowing that music was my passion. I wanted to find something to turn my knowledge and fascination with talking about music into something creative.

I’ve always been someone who really enjoys consuming music podcasts. This is corny, but I wanted to make the podcast that I wanted to hear. What I was looking for was really high-level, smart, fun, lighthearted debates about pop stars. I felt like there were podcasts that hit on that in varying degrees, but I had a vision of what that would look like as a fan of pop music and pop podcasts. I had a concept for what the podcast would be that I would be the most interested in hearing as a fan.

What skills did you have to learn to start being able to podcast? What did you already know?

Without knowing it, for years, I had been preparing myself for this because I listened to a lot of podcasts, and I really knew what I liked, what I didn’t like, what I was looking for in terms of how professional I wanted it to sound, and how structured I wanted the interviews to be. But I had to learn a lot of technical things.

For the first year of the show and maybe even longer, I did every aspect of it completely on my own, from conceptualization to reaching out and booking guests, preparing myself, preparing them, conducting and recording the interview, and editing and releasing the show. I had to learn everything from how to speak into a microphone correctly to—editing was one of the biggest technical learning curves. I still edit numerous episodes of the show, so it’s a skill that really helped me become my own podcasting studio. I didn’t have any money to do this. I didn’t have capital to spend on anybody helping me, so it had to be a one-man show. I learned how to edit, and then, of course, the skill of interviewing people.

When I first started I was like, “I finally have this place where I can say everything I want to say.” I sometimes go back and remember those early episodes, and I’ll just cringe and want to die, because I’ll think about how much I would cut the other person off or be looking for vehicles to talk. One thing that’s really shifted in my approach is, I’m there to facilitate a conversation, let the other person express their ideas, learn from what they’re speaking about, and really let them cook.

A big skill of mine was learning how to interface with the people I’m speaking with. Sharing my ideas, but also giving guests a platform to share theirs, and to learn from them. The craft of interviewing, especially over longform, has been a long-gestating skill for me. When I’m conducting interviews, especially for our main episodes—which are very, very long, and both people come in with a lot to say and a lot of research—you want to get to everything, but you also want to keep everything moving and get it all done in a reasonable amount of time.

At what point did you have the realization, “I shouldn’t be doing this all myself. I need help from Russ [Martin, producer]”? Was Russ someone you knew or someone you found?

It happened about a year into making the show. I was feeling completely overwhelmed. The process of making Pop Pantheon is incredibly involved. It’s a high-wire act because it’s not just the podcast—it’s two people sitting down to catch up. There’s a lot of planning and research, and the episodes are very diligently edited because they’re so long. I was very concerned with making sure this is compelling content and not boring to people. I was drowning.

At the beginning, just from the skills I was learning, I was dedicated to building it, and that got me through, but I hit a wall. When I first was looking for somebody, I didn’t have any money. The show didn’t make a red cent until we launched our Patreon about a year and a half ago. I said on air that I wanted to pay someone. I had a couple hundred dollars to spend a month and I was like, “Can somebody come in for a grand total of five hours a month to just take a few little things off of my plate?” Just so that instead of fully drowning, I was slightly head above water keeping this thing on track.

I didn’t know Russ, but the first time Pop Pantheon ever got mentioned on another podcast was on a show called DUNZO!. [Russ] had heard Pop Pantheon and recommended it to [Troy McEady, DUNZO! host], who’s been on Pop Pantheon now numerous times. [Russ] emailed me like, “I mentioned you on DUNZO!. I’m a big fan.” His tenacity and thoroughness, from the beginning…he wrote me this email with all these thoughts and ideas about how the show could grow, how much he wanted to be part of that, and how passionate he was.

We clicked instantaneously. It is the easiest relationship I have ever had in any area of my life. We are yin and yang. We’re similar in all the right ways, we’re different in all the right ways. Our value systems are very similar, so we work seamlessly. I needed Russ more than I even knew, and he just appeared. Literally, I would die for him. I’m not kidding. The show would not be where it is today without him. That is a solid fact.

Are your guests for the podcast friends, or are they strangers whom it feels intimidating to reach out to? How do you get through any anxiety around that?

One of my close friends is Lindsey Weber, the host of Who? Weekly, which is a large show, and she’s very ingratiated in the world of New York media, so through her, I knew a few people. Lindsay was a great mentor in terms of starting the show. She appeared on the show in the third episode or so, and once she got on the show, that opened a lot of doors because people would see she had been on the show. Soon after, I reached out to Jia Tolentino, who I didn’t know personally, but I was in one degree of separation from [her] in a lot of circles. She was completely gracious. Maybe one episode had come out, and she agreed to be on it.

I’m good at putting myself out there. I had spent six or seven years developing a television series about my life as a DJ prior to the pandemic, and I had shot a pilot and raised all the money for it by myself. I learned a lot through that process about what it takes to make a creative project happen and how much you have to just get over it and go for it. I remember when I was raising money, my therapist said something like, “When you ask somebody to do something, you don’t have to take responsibility for their answer. They’re all grownups who can say yes or no. You’re not walking up to anybody with a gun to their head and saying, ‘You need to be on my podcast.’”

By the time I started Pop Pantheon, I was like, “I’m going to go for it.” We still take that approach, and we still get ghosted and turned down by people all the time, but you miss all the shots you don’t take. Because I didn’t shy away from it, I caught some good breaks early on. Once Lindsey, Jia, and Lindsay Zoladz had done it early on, I think other people in the media sphere, which is a very tight-knit community, saw that other credible people had done it and were also open to doing it.

How did you learn how to create a TV show?

I’m the type of person that just goes for stuff. Even when I’m terrified, and I often am, I just do it anyway. In my twenties, one project I did for a while was this semi-fictionalized short story series called Trapped In The Booth. I was pulling the curtain back on DJing and nightlife and telling stories that dissuaded people from the idea that DJing was this glamorous, rockstar lifestyle and exposing some of the embarrassing aspects of being a working-class local DJ.

I got it in my head that it should be a TV show. I was studying acting a bit at the time. I wanted to find a way to grow the project and express myself in new ways. I spent a long time developing the show, a pilot script, and a series bible, and I got it in my head that I had to do a lot on my own if I wanted to get attention as a non-celebrity trying to get a TV show together. I decided to do the most I possibly could to prove myself. That spiraled into, “I’m going to make this pilot by myself, and I’m not going to do it in a shitty way. I’m going to try to pull together something amazing.” I learned how to do it just by having the insane chutzpah to try.

Eventually, as with all creative projects, collaboration came into play. When it really got magical is when I realized the real juice is not just me and my little egotistical vision of this. It’s what can come out of the collective. It was way bigger than I could have ever imagined. It was a life lesson. What came out of that was so much grander, and it was so beyond what I could have envisioned because it ended up not being just my thing. The experience of making it was the best thing I’ve ever done and prepared me for things I didn’t know it was even preparing me for in terms of how to make creative projects.

You mentioned collaboration a decent amount. I don’t immediately see DJing, writing, or music criticism as collaborative, and I say that as somebody who was previously a music critic. I’m curious to hear about any collaboration or lack thereof in those realms and how that’s shaped your creativity.

DJing was very non-collaborative. I spent a lot of my twenties viewing myself as a lone wolf. I was very much a loner, and DJing lent itself to that. I didn’t have a day job. A lot of people around me had opposite schedules and lifestyles from me. I also didn’t get into DJing because I loved to party. I was like, “I love music, and I’ve got to find a way to use that to make money,” so that was how I got into it.

Being in the DJ booth was an interesting experience of being both among a lot of people and separate from everybody, which, at the time, I really liked. I don’t think I went out to a nightclub of my own volition more than a dozen times throughout my entire twenties, even though I worked in them four nights a week. My life was very solitary and non-collaborative, and I started to burn out on that. I started to feel super lonely and stuck in that loneliness, and that my career and creative endeavors were hindered by how walled-off my life was.

I remember hitting a phase where I wanted other people in my life, and I didn’t know how to do that. Making Trapped In The Booth, the TV show, was truly a transformative exercise in what can come when you let your guard down, let your walls out, and let other people in. Magic can happen that’s greater than every individual person when you come together. Once I had that experience, I was like, “Collaboration is kind of my shit now.” Every major project in my life right now could not be happening without everybody else that’s involved in it.

It seems like you haven’t been doing as much writing and music criticism. I was curious why that is.

Frankly, it’s that I do not have a free fucking second in my entire life. My life is incredibly busy. Making Pop Pantheon is an absolute full-time job. It requires so much work. Add on top of that DJing, traveling for DJing, which I do sometimes multiple times a month…I have such a busy schedule that my time has become incredibly precious and valuable to me, and I don’t have the time to be pitching.

I have an entire platform where I can speak about music. I don’t have anything left to say about any of it. I’m talking all the time about my opinions on music. I’m not needing writing as an outlet at the moment.

That’s everything I wanted to chat with you about today, but if you had anything else you wanted to say, I’ll give you the floor.

The number-one thing I have always needed to hear that has been really helpful to me in starting your own projects—because starting projects is really, really hard—is that what separates people who have their own creative projects and make it happen and people that don’t is literally just the act of doing it. I always try to encourage anybody who is starting something, embarking on something—it’s scary creating something out of nothing. And the impostor syndrome—I’ve experienced all those things all the time. The only thing that has gotten me through it, and the only reason I have my projects and I’ve stumbled into some that are doing well, is because I’ve done it anyway.

I really encourage people to start something. I’ve experienced this myself in terms of fear that I’m not the one, I’m not talented enough, I don’t have the right connections…Find a way to do it anyway and get over that stuff as much as you can. Nobody starts as an expert in anything. I go back and listen to early episodes of Pop Pantheon now, and I’m like, I can’t even believe it, but I’m so happy I started somewhere.

I really encourage anybody that has the idea, and they have that spark of excitement around a project and they feel the passion for it—just go for it. You can make crazy shit happen if you just keep going. That’s been a big lesson in my life. That’s been my main thing with creativity.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Max Freedman.

They contacted a few contractors, who provided quotes in the $28,000 range for the solar system. But each bid came with a caveat: photovoltaic panels can last 25 years or more, but the roof on their 2,000-square-foot home had about 10 years left in it. This made for a difficult decision: Pay for a replacement now, which would nearly double the cost of the project, or install all that hardware knowing they’d need to remove and reinstall it when it came time to reroof — a job that can cost hundreds of dollars per panel.

“At that point we froze,” said Bryan Stubblefield. “The fact that we had one more decision to make caused pause.”

The Stubblefields are far from alone in this dilemma, said Amy Atchley, one of the contractors the couple contacted. Among the first questions her company,Amy’s Roofing and Solar, asks a customer is the age and condition of their roof. About half need work done to accommodate solar and, she says, the path forward can be particularly vexing for those who still have five, 10, or even 15 years to go before needing a reroof.

“It’s really hard to counsel people,” she said. “Most people just decide to wait.”

Residential solar systems usually provide 5 to 11 kilowatts of power, which, with some 5 millions homes tapping the sun, adds up to over 38 gigawatts nationally. That’s the equivalent of more than 11,000 wind turbines. Aside from helping mitigate climate change, photovoltaic panels can also help provide resiliency against outages. But when homeowners have to align their desire to go green with the age of their roof, those benefits can be delayed — or frightfully expensive. 

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They thought getting their home off fossil fuels would be straightforward. Chaos ensued.

Tik Root

One reason the question can be so vexing is because unlike solar panels, tax incentives don’t help offset underlying roof issues — even when addressing them is done while going solar. The Internal Revenue Service makes clear that the federal tax credit that can cover as much as 30 percent of a photovoltaic system does not include “traditional building components that primarily serve a roofing or structural function.” 

The Stubblefields said the lack of assistance “absolutely” influenced their decision to wait. But Bryan Stubblefield said he understands that it would be quite expensive for the government to subsidize such a major expense.

The potentially good news is that — regardless of roofing incentives — the residential solar market is nascent enough that it may not yet need to worry much about losing customers like the Stubblefields. The half a million or so residential solar systems that come online each year is far short of the 5 million or so homes that need a new roof each year. That means that there are still plenty of potential solar customers who need a new roof anyway — and it’s a demographic that many companies are targeting.

“The best time to go solar is when you’re getting a new roof,” said Kealy Dewitt, vice president of marketing and public policy at the roofing company GAF. The organization recently designed a product it calls Timberline Solar, which incorporates a photovoltaic panel into a shingle that is installed much like a conventional shingle. If GAF can get more people who need new roofs to convert to solar shingles, Dewitt said it would be “a massive deployment opportunity for clean energy.”

Atchley agrees. Although there may be some situations where it makes financial sense to install panels and dismantle them later to reroof, waiting to do it all at once makes the most sense. Many of her customers find her while seeking bids for a roof and end up installing solar, too. It rarely happens the other way around, she said.

Like Dewitt, she thinks the government could do more to incentivize integrated roofing and photovoltaic technologies. Her company, for example, sells a metal roof designed to easily accept solar and have a lifespan almost twice that of the average panel. It doesn’t currently qualify for clean energy incentives. 

“You’re getting the roof and solar,” she said. “It should count.”

Lawmakers have tried to address this issue. In 2021, democratic members of Congress introduced the “RAISE the Roof Act” that would have expanded the solar tax credit to include these integrated solutions. Such efforts have gone nowhere, however, leaving many would-be solar adopters with difficult calculations to make about their roof. That includes the Stubblefields, who have since moved.

“It looks like we have about 5 to 10 years left on the roof,” said Bryan. “We’re faced with the same question again.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Thinking of going solar? Wait until you need a new roof. on Oct 17, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Tik Root.

Chinese authorities detained four Tibetan teens from a shuttered Buddhist monastery school after they resisted being sent to schools run by the Chinese government, two residents living in Tibet told Radio Free Asia.

The students, aged 15-18, had been attending the school of the Lhamo Kirti Monastery in Dzoge County in Sichuan province, where instruction was in Tibetan and subjects included Buddhist teachings. 

But in July, the school was closed because Chinese officials said students under 18 had not attained the age at which they could receive monastic education. 

Instead, the nearly 600 students were told they had to attend government-run schools, where classes are taught exclusively in Mandarin and students study the political ideology of Chinese President Xi Jinping, referred to as “Xi Jinping Thought” class. 

The four boys resisted, and were detained on Oct. 2 and subjected to several days of “political re-education,” the residents who requested anonymity for security reasons said. 

They were released on Sunday and from Monday forced to attend a local government-run school, the sources said.

For generations, Tibetan boys as young as 5 or 6 have attended monasteries for education and religious training, where they use the Tibetan language. 

But since 2018, China has forced Tibetan boys to leave the monasteries, often against their will, and attend government-run boarding schools where the instruction is in Mandarin as part of Beijing’s “Sinicization” policy. 

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The Chinese government has been under fire from rights organizations and the international community for its educational policies in Tibet. Critics say that the introduction of Mandarin as the language of instruction is an attempt to force Tibetans to assimilate into Han Chinese culture.

Visitors say young children who attend Chinese boarding schools are unable to easily communicate with older relatives who grew up studying Tibetan, creating a generational rift and worries about the loss of a unique Tibetan identity.

The move to detain the four students came after authorities sent the remaining 200-odd students of the Buddhist school to state-administered schools on Oct. 2. 

“Those who refuse to go to the government-run school are being detained,” said another Tibetan resident, who requested anonymity for safety reasons. “Many children were also forced to attend political education sessions and accused of having been negatively influenced by their parents and the monastery.”

Translated by Dawa Dolma. Edited by Tenzin Pema, Eugene Whong, and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Tibetan.

Photograph Source: Metropolico.org – CC BY-SA 2.0

For the first time since the end of World War II, a far-right party has won a state election in Germany. This most recent success for the Alternative for Germany (AfD)—it won one-third of the votes in the eastern state of Thuringia—has generated a swirl of questions both inside and outside the country, such as:

+ Doesn’t Germany have laws that prevent such extremists from running in and winning elections?

+ Don’t Germans recoil instinctively from political parties that remind them of the Nazis?

+ What happened to the independent left, which was quite strong in Thuringia and other parts of the former East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall?

+ Will the far right take control of the entire country in Germany’s federal elections next September?

These questions have relevance beyond Germany. The far right is experiencing yet another wave of popularity across Europe. The anti-immigrant Party for Freedom came out on top in the last Dutch elections. Marine Le Pen’s National Assembly nearly won the most recent French elections after besting the competition in the European Parliament elections. And the equally far-right Freedom Party is poised to win the upcoming elections in Austria at the end of this month.

Taboos around extremism are being challenged the world over. Just as a substantial number of U.S. voters are willing to contemplate installing Donald Trump in the White House for a second term, an equally significant portion of the German electorate is willing to flirt once again with fascism. Are Germans, Americans, and others determined to repeat the history they’ve either forgotten or not bothered to learn in the first place?

The Platform of the Right

The Alternative for Germany started out in 2013, during the world-wide financial crisis, as a party opposed to the European Union bailouts of southern members like Greece. The AfD was a right-wing party but not a neo-Nazi one, which would have triggered a German law outlawing the political spawn of Hitler.

Particularly under leaders like Alice Weidel and Björn Höcke, however, the party moved inexorably closer to a crypto-Nazi position, much as white supremacists have become more prominent in the Republican Party thanks to Trump’s MAGA movement. According to investigations by the German magazine Der Spiegel, there has been considerable cross-pollination between the AfD and neo-Nazi movements, with representatives of the latter working as advisors for the former. Occasionally, when news breaks of AfD members attending neo-Nazi meetings, the party leadership publicly distances itself from that member, as it did by firing Roland Hartwig, an advisor to Alice Weidel, after he participated in a discussion on a “master plan” for mass deportations of immigrants. These scandals seem to have had little impact on the AfD’s popularity.

Björn Höcke, the politician most responsible for the AfD’s success in Thuringia, is also the most infamous with regard to his extremism. He participated in a neo-Nazi march in 2010. Articles that have appeared under a pseudonym in a neo-Nazi magazine were most likely written by Höcke, which prompted an attempt within the AfD to expel him (it failed). He has been convicted twice of using Nazi slogans. In 2019, a German court ruled that he can legally be described as a “fascist.” But voters in Thuringia had no problem backing this fascist and his party. In the election in nearby Saxony, without a local politician like Höcke, the AfD only came in second.

The popularity of the AfD, though initially built on anger at the EU, grew considerably when the party shifted its focus to immigrants, particularly those coming from the Middle East and North Africa. In 2015, Chancellor Angela Merkel welcomed a million new refugees to Germany and won praise from around the world. In Germany itself, however, the AfD was the chief beneficiary of the resentment and backlash to that decision.

Although the AfD has capitalized on Islamophobic sentiment by stigmatizing Muslim immigrants, it pivoted after 2022 to complain evenhandedly about the welcome Germany was extending to white Christians, namely those fleeing the war in Ukraine. The over one million Ukrainians living in Germany, the largest number of any European country, have access to quite generous state services—health care, rent, heating—as well as a monthly stipend. Unlike asylum-seekers, they can immediately apply for jobs. AfD supporters, particularly those in the poorer regions of former East Germany like Thuringia, are upset that those funds aren’t going to help native Germans.

As anti-immigrant sentiment became more widespread across the political spectrum in Germany, particularly among Christian Democrats, the AfD diversified. So, for instance, the party has gone big on climate change. It is now the only German party that has dug in its heels to prevent decarbonization. Over the last year, the far right has won over many German voters by painting heat pumps as overly expensive, thus sticking up for the “little guy” against allegedly expensive government efforts to abandon fossil fuels. The AfD’s support for coal mining strikes a chord in the areas of the old East Germany that were dependent on that industry.

And in Thuringia, the AfD forged political alliances to push through a measure to limit the expansion of wind power at the expense of forests and farmers. According to the AfD, “Wind turbines pose a fundamental threat to plants and animals as well as an impairment of people’s health and quality of life.” It has shown no comparable concern about the threats and impairments caused by coal, nuclear power, or oil. On environmental issues, the AfD stands apart even from the ultraconservative Christian Social Union, which backed renewable energy in its political base of Bavaria.

With its skepticism about climate change, and its critique of the neo-liberal, pro-globalization economic policies that most German parties have embraced, the far right has portrayed the political mainstream as out of touch. Ironically, when the German political scene was first disrupted in much the same way in the 1970s, it was the pro-environmental Green Party that challenged the then-consensus on fossil fuels and nuclear power. Today, the far right has stolen the mantle of anti-establishmentarianism from the left.

The good news, so far, is that the AfD is still far behind the Christian Democrats in the national polls. But especially after the results in Thuringia, the conservatives will be increasingly tempted to borrow from the AfD’s platform. The really sad news is that part of the left is doing the same thing.

The Convergence of Right and Left

It’s one thing for the AfD to win an election. It’s quite another for the party to govern. No other political party is willing to partner with the far right. Although the AfD got a lot more votes in Thuringia than the Christian Democrats or the left, it didn’t win the absolute majority necessary to form a government by itself.

As a result, the spotlight now shifts to the party that came in third in the state election, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), and its potential role as kingmaker. The BSW could break the electoral taboo and partner with the AfD. Or it could join with the conservatives and smuggle many of the AfD policies into the Thuringian government without the stigma attached to the far-right party.

That’s right: a party that considers itself “left” actually sounds more like a party situated as close to the neo-Nazis on the German political spectrum as the law allows.

Last year, Sahra Wagenknecht broke from the Left Party to create her own self-named alliance. Although she was a leader of the Left Party, she was developing political views quite at odds with her comrades. She adopted anti-immigrant positions. She was skeptical of the Left Party’s environmental agenda. And she did not support Ukraine in its war against Russia. On these issues and others (such as vaccination), Wagenknecht sounded a whole lot like the AfD. It must have been galling to her that the far right was doing so well in elections with what was essentially her platform. No surprise, then, that she jumped ship and formed her own party.

Her party received 15 percent of the vote in Thuringia, which was quite remarkable given that the BSW only debuted at the beginning of this year.

The principal position that marks the BSW as a progressive party is its focus on workers. But this should not fool Germans, who are well aware that many socialists concerned with the plight of workers joined the Nazi party (which, after all, was the party of “national socialism”). Wagenknecht’s odyssey from left to right resembles the opportunist drift of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, a liberal who saw a chance to capture right-wing votes and seized it. Orbán, at least, had the good grace to stop pretending that he was a liberal. How long will it take for Wagenknecht to sever her ties to the progressive tradition?

Left Adrift

Many progressive planks, once thought daring even by some on the left, have become part of the mainstream. Respect for LGBTQ rights, environmental protection, and international law can now be found in the most mundane of places, like the statements of the World Bank and in public school textbooks. Racist and sexist comments were once routine in U.S. newspapers; now they lead to public shaming.

It’s no surprise that pushback against these victories of the left has come from the far right, which is even more upset that traditional conservatives have accepted “diversity” and “sustainability” than that these ideas have found a place in the liberal mainstream. The MAGA camp wants to drag the United States back to a time before these social movement successes. Outside the United States, figures like Orbán and Russia’s Vladimir Putin treat these victories as examples of “Western” hegemony foisted upon their traditional, “pro-family,” religious countries.

The real surprise is how segments of the left have embraced this regressive agenda. Sahra Wagenknecht is only one particularly stark example. It can be found as well in elements of the U.S. left that have taken aim at “identity politics” as a dangerous distraction from meat-and-potatoes economic concerns. It’s also part of the strange cul-de-sac of the left that somehow believes that Russia is a progressive force in the world (along with China, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and other authoritarian regimes that have won some leftist hearts by standing up to the United States). It can even be found among progressives who criticize the necessary energy transition because they equate it solely with middle-class demands (for electric cars or heat pumps).

Is this the future of the left, either racing to the right like Sahra Wagenknecht or limping to the middle like Labor in the UK in order to win votes? The world is experiencing a dangerous uptick in authoritarianism, climate chaos, economic polarization, and expensive militarism. A progressive internationalism that is Green, democratic, and inclusive can offer a coherent response to these challenges.

Too many politicians are stuck in a status quo quagmire or are peddling some version of extremist populism. Voters eagerly await something different.

The post What the Heck’s Going on in Germany? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by John Feffer.

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Seven years ago, Oregon’s biggest natural gas company set out to convince lawmakers and residents that an abundant new source of green energy was out there, just waiting to be tapped.

Renewable natural gas is derived from decomposing organic waste at sites like landfills or dairy farms. It could, in theory, replace fossil natural gas in our pipelines with something far better for the environment.

The company, NW Natural, sent a bow-tied lobbyist to the state capital to talk up renewable natural gas, and it helped write a new law promoting development of the new fuel. The company worked with the Oregon Department of Energy to prepare a statewide inventory of potential resources. And, with more than $1 million in customer money, the company targeted those customers with ads, introducing a slogan that highlighted its commitment to lowering carbon emissions: “Less We Can.”

These and subsequent efforts became a template for NW Natural’s industry peers — and effectively tamped down a growing push by climate activists to phase out gas use in Oregon homes and electrify everything instead.

Seven years on, the utility has not delivered on its clean-energy sales pitch. NW Natural has more retail gas customers than ever. It supplies them little, if any, renewable natural gas. It sells them as much fossil natural gas in an average year as it did before. And it wages steady battles in the courts and in local city halls to keep the gas flowing.

Internal industry documents obtained by ProPublica, coupled with an analysis of regulatory filings and testimony before the state Legislature, reveal how NW Natural pursued an approach that perpetuated its core fossil fuel business while the company painted a picture of going green.

“The story they’re telling us is simply not possible,” said former state Rep. Phil Barnhart, a Democrat who voted for some of the company’s legislation when in office.

“What they’re trying to do,” Barnhart said, “is to prevent being put out of business.”

NW Natural, for its part, says that its renewables goals remain attainable and that it firmly believes in them. But “uncertain support from policy makers and regulators along with ongoing barriers demanded by certain climate advocates” have made the company’s path needlessly difficult, spokesperson David Roy wrote in an email. “It’s baffling how a relatively small but loud group of stakeholders have been in opposition to our many efforts to lower system emissions,” he continued. Roy defended the Less We Can campaign as “providing customers with valuable information.”

The story they’re telling us is simply not possible. … What they’re trying to do is to prevent being put out of business.

NW Natural operates in a state where residents and their Democratic leaders demand real action on climate change. Unlike many other public utilities, it does not sell electricity in addition to gas; if a home switches from gas ranges and furnaces to electric, the company likely loses that customer.

As it navigates the new climate economy, the utility has followed a course that other companies, especially energy companies, have taken in the face of public pressure: a loud embrace of environmental goals; then a complicated, often unproven solution; then a continuation of the status quo if and when that solution falls short. The company’s actions ensured that even as it has failed to hit its targets on renewables, and as the planet has kept heating up, it has faced few consequences.

An early ad from the Less We Can campaign suggested that Oregonians — and maybe NW Natural itself — could save the world with little in the way of personal sacrifice. It shows the sun emerging from a cloud. “Renewable Natural Gas is on the way home,” it reads. “Change for the better. Without changing a thing.”

The story of NW Natural’s long fight against the movement to phase out gas emerges from a trove of more than 100 insider documents from the Northwest Gas Association, a trade group that includes the company and five of its regional peers. The utility watchdog Energy and Policy Institute obtained the documents — four years’ worth of meeting minutes, strategy papers and PowerPoint presentations from 2017 through 2020 — and recently shared them with ProPublica.

The documents capture a moment when the natural gas industry realized it was becoming a target. Barely a decade before, fossil natural gas had been hailed as a bridge to a low-carbon future. The Obama administration promoted it as a cleaner alternative to coal and diesel, an energy source to rely on until more wind and solar could come online. Until 2010, even the Sierra Club supported it.

But pipelines carrying natural gas leaked more than was first understood, releasing uncombusted methane, a greenhouse gas more than 28 times as harmful as carbon dioxide. And North America’s fracking boom was making fossil natural gas so plentiful and cheap that environmentalists increasingly worried the world would get stuck on this energy bridge forever. Going all-electric, they argued, was the way forward.

The Northwest Gas Association decided it had to confront what internal documents alternately called the “anti-fossil fuel chorus,” “zero fossil fuel paradigm,” “zero carbon threat” or, simply, an “existential challenge.”

Board members met to plan their response one June morning in 2017 at Washington state’s Skamania Lodge, where floor-to-ceiling windows frame the Cascade Mountains and Columbia River Gorge, then again for two days in September at another luxury lodge, Cedarbrook, set on 18 acres of gardens and wetlands outside Seattle.

The gas executives agreed that climate change needed to be addressed but that climate policies in the Northwest should not penalize natural gas utilities or their customers.

They adopted a new strategic plan to push a unified message: Natural gas can be compatible with a low-carbon Northwest economy, thanks in part to emerging concepts like renewable natural gas. (Today, the association and NW Natural say more specifically that policies favoring electric stoves and heat pumps won’t necessarily cut emissions because the region’s strained electrical system relies increasingly on gas-fired power plants.)

To sell the idea of continued gas use, the strategic plan said the industry should adopt a more “assertive advocacy style” that borrows insights from psychological research. People first make value judgments “via intuition and emotion,” the strategic plan noted, not facts. So the association would place “greater emphasis on the heart, in the public battle for the ‘hearts and minds.’”

NW Natural’s representative at the trade association, an executive named Kim Rush (Kim Heiting, at the time), gave her industry colleagues a look inside Less We Can. It was just the kind of play for the heart the strategic plan envisioned.

“It’s a theme line,” Rush’s slideshow, dated July 2017, explained. “A rallying cry. A movement. A coalition with customers. A celebration. A call to action. A clean energy stake-in-the-ground… in 3 words or less.”

NW Natural had already road-tested the new slogan across four focus groups, via a consumer survey with 864 respondents and through television-ad concepts shown to 100 customers and 100 noncustomers. It had readied a new website, www.lesswecan.com, which featured cows and green fields and a FAQ about renewable natural gas.

One of Rush’s slides contained the campaign’s takeaways. Among them: “NW Natural and natural gas have an important, long-term role to play in our energy future”; “NW Natural has a plan, a goal and a running start”; and “Renewable natural gas is an exciting part of that plan.”

The campaign went live in fall 2017. Residents of Portland and other Oregon cities saw Less We Can TV spots, Less We Can YouTube videos, Less We Can newsletters, Less We Can billboards and Less We Can water bottles.

“Can a natural gas company be serious when it says it wants us to use less gas?” one video asked before showing a scene of a couple chopping vegetables together in the kitchen. “Can we really raise our families and lower emissions? Can we heat our homes and fight climate change? Can we expand our economy and use less?”

“Yes,” a narrator answered, as the video cut to an image of free-range cows and hand-drawn arrows pointing to the words “renewable natural gas.”

At the time the Less We Can campaign was getting off the ground, not a single public utility in the United States regularly piped renewable natural gas to customers’ homes. The market for such organics-based gas was mainly clean fuels programs for vehicle fleets. Residential use would be pioneering, even experimental.

But if NW Natural’s ads had gotten ahead of reality, the company was already backing legislation that seemed to portend widespread use of the alternative fuel.

It started earlier in 2017 with a bill in the Oregon Legislature that put forward a seemingly straightforward proposition. Oregon would take stock of its every landfill, every dairy farm, every sewage plant and every conceivable pile of woody debris: sites that could emit methane as organic matter broke down. Why not study how much was out there? The bill, a precursor to similar bills in other states, including Washington, sailed through with little opposition.

The ensuing inventory was a rigorous, yearlong process led by the Oregon Department of Energy that produced a 110-page report to the Legislature in September 2018 — which NW Natural quickly turned into a valuable talking point.

The report’s authors found that Oregon’s “technical potential” for renewable natural gas was significant: nearly 50 billion cubic feet. “That’s equivalent to the total amount of natural gas used by all Oregon residential customers today,” read a NW Natural press release. The company would go on to use variations of this phrase on its website, in annual sustainability reports and in statements to lawmakers.

But “technical potential” represents the amount Oregon could produce if money was no obstacle. NW Natural said little about another, more problematic finding: Using currently available technologies and waste streams, the state could produce just 10 billion cubic feet of gas from organic sources.

Barnhart, the former state lawmaker, says the utility’s selective interpretation of the study not only overstated the size of the resource, it left out “the real denominator” by ignoring industrial and commercial gas use. Including those and transportation customers in the equation would put total gas demand in Oregon at three times the figure NW Natural cited; the state’s potential renewable natural gas resources, using current technology, could meet less than 7% of that demand.

“NW Natural has done a very, very good job of saying true things in a way that is grossly misleading,” Barnhart said.

Roy, the company spokesperson, said it was reasonable to call out Oregon’s full theoretical capacity to make the biogas, noting that all renewable energy sources have required innovation to bring them to market. As for focusing on residential use alone, NW Natural said highlighting a single sector was a useful way to “help people understand the magnitude of the resource.”

The company leaned on the state’s most optimistic numbers in early 2019 when it returned to lawmakers with a second, far more expansive bill that was the first of its kind in the country.

The new bill aimed to address another key barrier to NW Natural’s plans for renewable natural gas. Under existing state rules, utilities had to purchase gas for their customers at the lowest available price, and gas made from biomass could be 10 times more expensive than fossil natural gas. But the bill would allow NW Natural to pursue renewable natural gas and recoup the added cost from its customers. It would be able to spend up to 5% of its annual revenues, some $40 million or more, to secure a dedicated supply.

The legislation also set out ambitious but voluntary goals for NW Natural and other large gas utilities: to produce or acquire renewable natural gas equivalent to 5% of deliveries to retail customers by 2024, 10% by 2029 and 30% by 2050.

The company sent an executive named Anna Chittum to testify before an Oregon Senate committee, and she cited the inventory almost immediately. “They found about 50 billion cubic feet of potential in the state of Oregon,” she said.

Chittum emphasized that this would be a boon not only for the planet but for Oregon businesses.

“Renewable natural gas is a local resource, first and foremost,” she continued. “We believe that Oregon entities like wastewater treatment plants and landfills, some of the dairies in our region and other companies, as well as our natural gas customers, will directly benefit.”

The bill passed easily and with support from both parties just a day before a partisan meltdown tanked a more controversial piece of climate legislation, an effort to create a California-style carbon cap-and-trade system. The changes called for by cap-and-trade would have been mandatory, unlike those created by the renewable gas legislation. (The company now says it wanted binding targets for renewable gas but “other stakeholders,” whom it declined to name, opposed them.)

On social media, the company’s Kim Rush soon cheered the bill’s success, sharing a photo of Oregon Gov. Kate Brown at a September 2019 signing ceremony, flanked by fellow lawmakers, NW Natural CEO David Anderson and at least three other employees of the company.

“Proud of our state for leading the nation on renewable natural gas development!” Rush wrote. “A vital step in the path toward decarbonizing our pipeline network. #LessWeCan.”

Despite the victory lap with Oregon’s chief executive, behind the scenes NW Natural and its allies were preparing to quash measures that activist groups and government officials said were needed to reduce the gas industry’s footprint.

For this mission the Northwest Gas Association initially hired Kelly Evans, a public affairs consultant who once ran the successful reelection campaign of Washington Gov. Christine Gregoire. Evans recommended creating a formal coalition with partners outside the gas industry to lobby for continued natural gas use. It would draw in restaurant associations, labor unions, appliance manufacturers, homebuilders and more.

The winner of a million-dollar contract to build just such a coalition and launch a pro-gas campaign across the Northwest was the communications firm Quinn Thomas. It had helped Washington business interests win fights against cap-and-trade and a carbon tax in that state in 2015 and 2016. Now the firm pledged to “defeat policies detrimental to the natural gas industry” once again.

“When the time comes to ‘turn on’ the coalition to combat a specific proposal,” Quinn Thomas wrote in its bid, “we have extensive experience training and deploying spokespeople for public hearings.”

Evans and Quinn Thomas did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment.

Northwest cities including Bellingham, Washington, and Eugene, Oregon, were beginning to consider natural gas restrictions. Evans had outlined a messaging plan for such fights, one focused on affordability, reliability and resiliency, on solutions like renewable natural gas, and, most of all, on consumer choice: “There are policies being advanced to limit YOUR choice…” and “people want to take it away,” she wrote when describing the plan.

After activists in Eugene accused NW Natural of overstating Oregon’s potential for renewable natural gas, Rush prepared a letter in 2021 to the city manager repeating the consultant’s talking points — “affordability, reliability and choice” — almost verbatim.

Eugene’s City Council nevertheless passed a partial natural gas ban in early 2023. Three days later, a group formed to collect signatures to revoke the ban, its name another apparent echo of the talking points: “Eugene Residents for Energy Choice.” Belying its grassroots name, the group’s work was bankrolled by $1,014,300 in donations — all but $220 of them from NW Natural. (The council eventually revoked the ban on its own.)

Another fight loomed at the state level. With cap-and-trade dead in the Oregon Legislature, Brown had issued an executive order mandating statewide controls on greenhouse gas emissions. For much of 2020 and 2021, the state prepared new rules to put Brown’s order in action.

The Oregon Public Utility Commission, which determines which costs NW Natural can pass along to consumers, soon began to question whether renewable natural gas was the most economical way for the company to meet the new climate rules. What if money spent on renewable natural gas went instead to home weatherization or more efficient appliances? What if it wasn’t spent on natural gas at all?

NW Natural filed suit against regulations stemming from the governor’s executive order in early 2022, serving as the lead plaintiff. The company noted in a letter to its customers that it was committed to addressing climate change, citing its support for past “landmark” renewable natural gas legislation among other actions. It said its legal challenge to the state’s climate program came only “after exhausting all other options.”

NW Natural’s public messaging around renewable natural gas, meanwhile, remained upbeat. Starting in the summer of 2021, its events team visited at least two dozen street fairs and town festivals across Oregon with what it called the Cowthouse (“think cow + outhouse,” the utility explained): a fake toilet with cow legs sticking out below the door.

Those who approached the Cowthouse were challenged to a riddle: “What do a cow, a toilet and a banana peel have in common?” The answer, “RNG,” for renewable natural gas, was stamped on sugar cookies the company handed out.

As it pitched Oregonians on renewable natural gas, NW Natural had gone all out in emphasizing the vast amounts of rotting matter their state could use to produce it. In the end, the company opted not to use a bit of homegrown waste. It turned instead to other states, especially Nebraska.

Meat and poultry giant Tyson Foods kept two of its biggest beef slaughterhouses there, each week churning through tens of thousands of cows that, in turn, churned out hundreds of thousands of pounds of manure as they awaited their end at the facility.

Rotting manure lets off methane. Rotting carcasses let off methane. Rotting garbage lets off methane. The gas is so much worse for the climate than carbon dioxide, ounce for ounce, that capturing a farm or landfill’s uncontrolled methane and purifying it to pipeline quality could, under the right circumstances, offset the harm from emissions it creates when burned.

NW Natural has described renewable natural gas as “carbon neutral” in corporate reports and a “zero-carbon resource” in news releases. But in more recent filings with Oregon regulators, the company estimates that gas from its project in Dakota City, Nebraska, while cleaner than ordinary natural gas, still packs 25% of the climate impact. At the Tyson slaughterhouse in Lexington, Nebraska, it’s 40%.

In an interview, Chittum noted that there is no universal standard to measure how much a renewable natural gas project actually helps the climate. By the standards followed by some state programs, including in California, she said the Tyson projects could possibly be certified as carbon-zero, or even carbon-negative. But it’s expensive to hire someone to do a full accounting, and Oregon doesn’t require NW Natural to prove any benefit — so “we just haven’t spent … the third-party dollars to go calculate all of that,” she said.

Methane from the Tyson operations is captured and piped not to Oregon, but to customers mainly near the two plants. NW Natural counts it as a credit against the fossil natural gas its own customers burn.

For 2023, NW Natural reported renewable natural gas from the Tyson projects, some dairy digesters in Wisconsin, a sewage treatment plant in New York and a food-waste project in Utah.

“It doesn’t matter where the renewable molecule of RNG comes from if reducing emissions is the goal,” NW Natural’s Roy told ProPublica.

NW Natural has notched a series of wins in recent months.

For the fourth year in a row, it was named one of the best gas utilities in the West by the survey company J.D. Power. For the third year in a row, it was named one of the world’s most ethical companies by Ethisphere, a for-profit company that rates other companies’ ethics for a fee.

In late December, the Oregon Court of Appeals ruled in favor of NW Natural in overturning the state climate program that resulted from Brown’s executive order.

In May, NW Natural touted the results of a poll it had commissioned: It said 72% of Oregon voters opposed bans on natural gas in new homes and buildings, a 9-point increase since 2019. “Voters’ attention is more focused on what they believe are pressing concerns, such as homelessness,” a press release said. More than 75% of respondents supported efforts promoting renewable natural gas.

It doesn’t matter where the renewable molecule of RNG comes from if reducing emissions is the goal.

But the renewable gas business has not gone as billed.

The company’s data for 2023 showed that even as it harnesses the waste streams of one of the world’s biggest meatpackers — at an anticipated cost of $38 million, if two more planned Tyson projects come online — NW Natural is falling far short of the share of its supply it said would come from the alternative fuel.

In a document filed in August with the Public Utility Commission, the company said it had slowed its procurement and did not expect to hit the goal of 5% it had set for 2024. It blamed “policy and regulatory uncertainty,” particularly the commission’s skepticism of its renewable natural gas plans.

Less We Can is taking on a new meaning.

After years of fanfare about renewable natural gas, what’s its share of NW Natural’s gas supply today?

Less than 1%.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by McKenzie Funk.

I wear a few different hats. I’m an herbalist foundationally, and the work with plants then radiates out into all of the other things that I do.

I’m also an educator and run various programs about plant medicine and folk magic and ancestral remembrance. And I work one-on-one with people. With my clients, I have an apothecary and I formulate for individuals based on whatever health or energetic or spiritual reasons they’re coming in. And then I also have a product line [where] I sell and make potions. For me, a lot of my creative work is based on being in relationship with plants and our non-human kin.

But I also am a writer and I spend a lot of time reading poetry. And those things also really influence what I do and how I teach.

Since you work in a number of formats that are outside of what typically gets defined as “art,” I’m curious if you’ve ever felt like you’ve had to grapple with that in how you self-describe? Would you characterize potion-making as an artistic practice?

I feel like my experience of that inquiry changes on a day-to-day basis. I have never really called myself an artist. And I think that comes from a lot of cultural conditioning around, well, “an artist is someone who is writing every day or is painting every day.” And I know it’s not true. I know that in my body, and I know that through examples of my friends and community and family. But it’s not a word that I have felt comfortable using. However, there is an art to herbalism. There’s an art to magic, there’s an art of poetry, there’s an art of storytelling, and all of those are things that I do.

There’s something on a deeper level about the history of healing arts and the ways in which the medical profession was created through Renaissance Europe; the ways in which power was taken from mainly women who held these roles as healers and midwives and nurses in a community. And then it became a professionalized thing that only men who had certain levels of education could access. I’m like, those women are artists who are working with the seasons and working with the elements and working with the plants to provide medicine for a community. There’s something there, in how we look at who gets to be an actual artist or who gets to be someone who is in a healing profession. It’s an old wound—it’s something I’m thinking about often.

I would love to talk to you about plant sentience and how you approach communicating with or “collaborating with plants,” as you describe it on your website. How did you begin communicating with plants?

There’s definitely layers of self-awareness in terms of how it happened. I could sense energy from plants as a kid. I actually think that’s something that most kids feel and are in tune with. When I talk about flower essences with kids, they get it immediately. And I had a very strong connection with both apple trees and birch trees. Trees were big for me when I was a kid, and I would just spend time with them and get these different images from them in my mind, but then also would sense them in my body. Just through being next to a tree, I would notice that with birch, there was this feeling of movement that would sort of ground in my belly and then move up and out of my body. And then over the years, especially as a teenager, that’s something that I forgot and didn’t pay attention to and didn’t value.

Then when I circled back to the plants many years later, part of it came just from being in relationship—just being like, I’m going to actually go sit next to a mugwort plant and see what I feel. And I think that that’s actually all it really takes, is showing up season after season. There needs to be a willingness of, I want to become friends with this plant. And then you just ask a question. I mean, it could really be as simple as, “How do I feel you in my body?” Just sitting with the plant and breathing with the plant and seeing where it takes you.

It is so easy actually, and it’s extremely intuitive work. I think most people, once they have permission [that] this is something that I can do, it’s something that ancestrally we all have done. It’s how we learned from the plants, how all of our ancestors learned about the plants: direct communication and spending time with them, being an active listener. We just forget that that’s something that we’re able to do. I don’t think that anyone’s necessarily better at it than someone else. We all just receive information in really different ways. And for a lot of us, we’ve turned off that form of receiving information.

Do you feel like in the process of giving yourself that permission and developing those faculties to be able to listen and be receptive to plants, there’s some amount of “de-humaning” you have to do?” Is there some amount of “de-humaning” you need to do in order to develop those faculties?

I think if anything, you have to become more human, because it’s just foundational humanity. Language is a form of spell-casting. And if we’re telling ourselves the story of, “I don’t know how to do this,” that’s the language we’re running through our head most days, then yeah, you’re not going to feel it. Turning off that voice, the fear of, “I don’t know what I’m doing,” or “I’m doing it the wrong way.” Instead, switching to another very human way of being, which is being in our body, moving from the head and into other places of knowing in our bodies.

For me, I get so much information from my stomach, and I think a lot of people do, but they don’t think of that as information. So it’s shifting from this very mental, verbal language and moving into experiential. That’s very human to be like, “Where am I feeling this in my body?” Plants give us a lot of non-verbal cues, but so do we, that’s also how we communicate with one another. It is about coming back to the body and trusting in the body, which is something that a lot of people have a really hard time doing.

You teach many classes related to herbalism and plant divination. How has your approach to teaching evolved?

One of the biggest things that has changed over the years is that I used to feel a real urgency around providing so much information in a class. I wanted people to get their money’s worth. I wanted them to feel saturated with how much of this knowledge I could offer and give. What I’ve moved more into has been about opening opportunities for people to feel, for them to step into the experience of being with the plants.

It’s like, yeah, I could tell you 20 different things about what this particular plant does, but what if we just went and felt it together? What if we just went and sat with it and saw what came up? Rather than me telling you what it’s going to do and creating some sort of expectation around what you are going to feel or sense or learn, let’s go see. When I’ve been a student, that’s the kind of learning that I always want to do. So I keep moving more and more into that realm.

Are you able to support yourself financially through your herbalism work? What has the journey been in terms of financial sustainability with your work?

I’m able to sustain myself with my work, which is a gift, and I feel very, very lucky to do so. But it is the wearing many different hats piece that makes it work. I don’t think I could sustain myself just from my individual client practice. I need to also teach. My work is shifting right now, so I feel like it’s a really good time to ask me this question. The truth is that I’m entering a big moment of change, and I don’t really know what some of it’s going to look like. Earlier in the year, I stopped selling my product line. So that stream of income has dropped. I just lost my office space this past spring due to a shitty landlord situation. So I’m currently only seeing clients online, which is very limiting.

I’m also considering opening a school here in the Hudson Valley where I live, and moving a lot of my teaching back offline, because I only really brought it online in 2020. I’m really interested in moving more offline. I just deleted my Instagram last week. I walked away from that. I keep talking about localizing my practice, and I’m going to see what that looks like. I have some money set aside, but I need things to work. There’s a lot about it that feels kind of tenuous right now, but I’m also experimenting.

I’m curious to hear more about your attitude toward social media these days.

I’ve been on Instagram for so long, 10 years. It’s a really long time when you think about it. And the app changed so much in the past few years to being so ad-based. That’s just not how I work and not how I relate to the world, through short and sweet bits of information. And I felt addicted to the app and addicted to refreshing it and looking at things that I have absolutely no interest in really.

For me, there’s been a real reckoning of “How do I really want to be spending my time?” What I really want to do is gather with people in my community. And what I really want to be doing is being a better friend and writing my friends letters, rather than keeping tabs on them on Instagram. The level of communication that I used to feel like was possible on that app has devolved. So it didn’t feel in alignment for me anymore, or even interesting. I just felt bad about myself when I was on the app. It’s terrifying, because there’s a part of me that feels like I need it for my work. I don’t really know how that’s going to go.

That response makes me wonder about your personal definition of success and how it informs some of these choices you’re making and the ways you choose to show up on the world’s stage.

Nobody gets into herbalism to become a millionaire. I’m very glad that I’ve been able to sustain the life that I live from this work. But in terms of what I actually value as success is about having a really rich inner life and a really rich relationship with my friends and community. Cooking food for friends feels like success to me.

I feel like it sounds cheesy, but I’m a pretty simple person in a lot of ways, in terms of what I feel to be successful. If I get to go for a long walk after seeing clients and go jump in a body of water, I’m thrilled. How I want to show up on the world stage is as someone who feels connected to the land, as someone who feels interwoven into the web of life. I want to feel creatively charged by reading poetry. And I just want to read more in general. Things like that to me are what I deem success. Like what’s the vitality of my creative practice? And what I have noticed is that being on Instagram hasn’t been helping that vitality or even my own just energetic vitality. And so I think for me, that level of success has a lot to do with my mental health and making sure that that feels good. It doesn’t always, but the plants help, the plants really do help.

What are some of the bigger challenges that you’ve faced in pursuing this kind of field of work? Is there any advice you’d like to share for someone trying to build their own sustainable creative practice?

Some of the challenges for me have been that there’s really not a set way of being an herbalist in the world, which is both a blessing and a curse. There’s a lot of freedom about how you can do your work. And it’s also like, “Oh my god. Am I going in the right direction? Does this feel like it’s going to be worth it?” There’s a lot that just is not guaranteed.

I currently feel really challenged by climate collapse and climate grief—I am looking at this linden tree outside of my window that was just completely devoured this year by this invasive moth species that came. A lot of my livelihood has to do with [my] relationship to the land and being able to grow the things that I want to grow. With so much changing really quickly, that piece feels scary. All of my friends who are farmers feel the same way.

In terms of advice, I mean, it’s the most non-business advice that I could ever give, which is if you’re a plant person, the best thing that you can do is ask the plants. And that’s something that I’ve consistently done throughout all of the years of working for myself. When I’m in a moment of not knowing or in challenge, I try to ask for help from the plants. That has been a huge wayfinder in my business and has helped me to trust my intuition. To really lean on that which supports your intuitive knowing is the best advice I could give.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Rene Kladzyk.

This week, the tech giant made a separate but related announcement. It plans to invest in water conservation along the Maipo River, which is the primary source of water for the Santiago region. Amazon will partner with a water technology startup to help farmers along the river install drip irrigation systems on 165 acres of farmland. The plan is poised to conserve enough water to supply around 300 homes per year, and it’s part of Amazon’s campaign to become “water positive” by 2030, meaning the company will conserve or replenish more water than it uses up.

The reasoning behind this water initiative is clear: Data centers require large amounts of water to cool their servers, and Amazon plans to spend $100 billion to build more of them over the next decade as part of a big bet on its Amazon Web Services cloud-computing platform. Other tech companies such as Microsoft and Meta, which are also investing in data centers to sustain the artificial-intelligence boom, have made similar water pledges amid a growing controversy about the sector’s thirst for water and power.

Amazon claims that its data centers are already among the most water-efficient in the industry, and it plans to roll out more conservation projects to mitigate its thirst. However, just like corporate pledges to reach “net-zero” emissions, these water pledges are more complex than they seem at first glance. While the company has indeed taken steps to cut water usage at its facilities, its calculations don’t account for the massive water needs of the power plants that keep the lights on at those very same facilities. Without a larger commitment to mitigating Amazon’s underlying stress on electricity grids, conservation efforts by the company and its fellow tech giants will only tackle part of the problem, according to experts who spoke to Grist.

The powerful servers in large data centers run hot as they process unprecedented amounts of information, and keeping them from overheating requires both water and electricity. Rather than try to keep these rooms cool with traditional air-conditioning units, many companies use water as a coolant, running it past the servers to chill them out. The centers also need huge amounts of electricity to run all their servers: They already account for around 3 percent of U.S. power demand, a number that could more than double by 2030. On top of that, the coal, gas, and nuclear power plants that produce that electricity themselves consume even larger quantities of water to stay cool.

Will Hewes, who leads water sustainability for Amazon Web Services, told Grist that the company uses water in its data centers in order to save on energy-intensive air conditioning units, thus reducing its reliance on fossil fuels. 

“Using water for cooling in most places really reduces the amount of energy that we use, and so it helps us meet other sustainability goals,” he said. “We could always decide to not use water for cooling, but we want to, a lot, because of those energy and efficiency benefits.”

In order to save on energy costs, the company’s data centers have to evaporate millions of gallons of water per year. It’s hard to say for sure how much water the data center industry consumes, but the ballpark estimates are substantial. One 2021 study found that U.S. data centers consumed around 415,000 acre-feet of water in 2018, even before the artificial-intelligence boom. That’s enough to supply around a million average homes annually, or about as much as California’s Imperial Valley takes from the Colorado River each year to grow winter vegetables. Another study found that data centers operated by Microsoft, Google, and Meta withdrew twice as much water from rivers and aquifers as the entire country of Denmark. 

It’s almost certain that this number has ballooned even higher in recent years as companies have built more centers to keep up with the artificial-intelligence boom, since AI programs such as ChatGPT require massive amounts of server real estate. Tech companies have built hundreds of new data centers in the last few years alone, and they are planning hundreds more. One recent estimate found that ChatGPT requires an average-sized bottle of water for every 10 to 50 chat responses it provides. The on-site water consumption at any one of these companies’ data centers could now rival that of a major beverage company such as PepsiCo. 

Amazon doesn’t provide statistics on its absolute water consumption; Hewes told Grist the company is “focused on efficiency.” However, the tech giant’s water usage is likely lower than some of its competitors — in part because the company has built most of its data centers with so-called evaporative cooling systems, which require far less water than other cooling technologies and only turn on when temperatures get too high. The company pegs its water usage at around 10 percent of the industry average, and in temperate locations such as Sweden, it doesn’t use any water to cool down data centers except during peak summer temperatures. 

Companies can reduce the environmental impact of their AI business by building them in temperate regions that have plenty of water, but they must balance those efficiency concerns with concerns about land and electricity costs, as well as the need to be close to major customers. Recent studies have found that data center water consumption in the U.S. is “skewed toward water stressed subbasins” in places like the Southwest, but Amazon has clustered much of its business farther east, especially in Virginia, which boasts cheap power and financial incentives for tech firms.

“A lot of the locations are driven by customer needs, but also by [prices for] real estate and power,” said Hewes. “Some big portions of our data center footprint are in places that aren’t super hot, that aren’t in super water stressed regions. Virginia, Ohio — they get hot in the summer, but then there are big chunks of the year where we don’t need to use water for cooling.”  Even so, the company’s expansion in Virginia is already causing concerns over water availability.

To mitigate its impacts in such basins, the company also funds dozens of conservation and recharge projects like the one in Chile. It donates recycled water from its data centers to farmers, who use it to irrigate their crops, and it has also helped restore the rivers that supply water-stressed cities such as Cape Town, South Africa; in northern Virginia, it has worked to install cover crop farmland that can reduce runoff pollution in local waterways. The company treats these projects the way other companies treat carbon offsets, counting each gallon recharged against a gallon it consumes at its data centers. Amazon said in its most recent sustainability report that it is 41 percent of the way to meeting its goal of being “water positive.” In other words, it has funded projects that recharge or conserve a little over 4 gallons of water for every 10 gallons of water it uses. 

But despite all this, the company’s water stewardship goal doesn’t include the water consumed by the power plants that supply its data centers. This consumption can be as much as three to 10 times as large as the on-site water consumption at a data center, according to Shaolei Ren, a professor of engineering at the University of California, Riverside, who studies data center water usage. As an example, Ren pointed to an Amazon data center in Pennsylvania that relies on a nuclear power plant less than a mile away. That data center uses around 20 percent of the power plant’s capacity.

“They say they’re using very little water, but there’s a big water evaporation happening just nearby, and that’s for powering their data center,” he said.

Companies like Amazon can reduce this secondary water usage by relying on renewable energy sources, which don’t require anywhere near as much water as traditional power plants. Hewes says the company has been trying to “manage down” both water and energy needs through a separate goal of operating on 100 percent renewable energy, but Ren points out that the company’s data centers need round-the-clock power, which means intermittently available renewables like solar and wind farms can only go so far.

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Amazon isn’t the only company dealing with this problem. CyrusOne, another major data center firm, revealed in its sustainability report earlier this year that it used more than eight times as much water to source power as it did on-site at its data centers.

“As long as we are reliant on grid electricity that includes thermoelectric sources to power our facilities, we are indirectly responsible for the consumption of large amounts of water in the production of that electricity,” the report said.

As for replenishment projects like the one in Chile, they too will only go part of the way toward reducing the impact of the data center explosion. Even if Amazon is “water positive” on a global scale, with projects in many of the same basins where it owns data centers, that doesn’t mean it won’t still compromise water access in specific watersheds. The company’s data centers and their power plants may still withdraw more water than the company replenishes in a given area, and replenishment projects in other aquifers around the world won’t address the physical consequences of that specific overdraft.

“If they are able to capture some of the growing water and clean it and return to the community, that’s better than nothing, but I think it’s not really reducing the actual consumption,” Ren said. “It masks out a lot of real problems, because water is a really regional issue.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Amazon says it’s going ‘water positive’ — but there’s a problem on Aug 29, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Jake Bittle.

With a click, with a shock
Phone’ll jingle, door’ll knock, open the latch
Something’s coming, don’t know when but it’s soon . . .

— “Something’s Coming,” West Side Story, lyrics by S. Sondheim, music by L. Bernstein.

Shock should not be the word, but when World War III breaks fully loose many who are now sleeping will be shocked.  The war has already started, but its full fury and devastation are just around the corner.  When it does, Tony’s singular fate in West Side Story will be the fate of untold millions.

It is a Greek tragedy brought on by the terrible hubris of the United States, its NATO accomplices, and the genocidal state of Israel and the Zionist terrorists who run it.

Tony felt a miracle was due, but it didn’t come true for him except to briefly love Maria and then get killed as result of a false report, and only a miracle will now save the world from the cataclysm that is on the way, whether it is initiated by intent, a false report, an accident, or the game of nuclear chicken played once too often.

Let us hope but not be naïve.  The signs all point in one direction.  The gun on the wall in the first act of this tragic play is primed to go off in the final one.  Every effort to avoid this terrible fate by seeking peace and not war has been rejected by the U.S. and its equally insane allies.  Every so-called red line laid down by Russia, Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Palestinians, and their allies has been violated with impunity and blatant arrogance.  But impunity has its limits and the dark Furies of vengeance will have their day.

“It is the dead, not the living,” said Antigone, “who make the longest demands.”  Their ghostly voices cry out to be avenged.

I wish I were not compelled by conscience to write this, but it seems clearly evident to me that we stand on the edge of an abyss.  The fate of the world rests in the hands of leaders who are clearly psychotic and who harbor death wishes.  It’s not terribly complex.  Netanyahu and Biden are two of them.  Yes, like other mass killers, I think they love their children and give their dog biscuits to eat.  But yes, they also are so corrupted in their souls that they relish war and the sense of false power and prestige it brings them.  They gladly kill other people’s children.  They can defend themselves many times over, offer all kinds of excuses, but the facts speak otherwise.  This is hard for regular people to accept.

The great American writer who lived in exile in France for so many years and who was born 100 years ago this month, James Baldwin, wrote an essay – “The Creative Process” – in which he addressed the issue of how becoming a normal member of society dulls one to the shadow side of personal and social truths.  He wrote:

And, in the same way that to become a social human being one modifies and suppresses and, ultimately, without great courage, lies to oneself about all one’s interior, uncharted chaos, so have we, as a nation, modified or suppressed and lied about all the darker forces in our history.

And lie and suppress we still do today.

Imagine, if you will, that Mexico has invaded Texas with the full support of the Russian, Chinese, and Iranian governments.  Their weapons are supplied by these countries and their drone and missile attacks on the U.S. are coordinated by Russian technology.  The Seven Mile Bridge in Florida has been attacked.  The U.S. Mexican border is dotted with Russian troops on bases with nuclear missiles aimed at U.S. cities.

It’s not hard to do.  That is a small analogy to what the U.S./NATO is doing to Russia.

Do you think the United States would not respond with great force?

Do you think it would not feel threatened with nuclear annihilation?

How do you think it would respond?

The U.S/NATO war against Russia via Ukraine is accelerating by the day.  The current Ukrainian invasion of Russia’s Kursk region has upped the ante dramatically.  After denying it knew in advance of this Ukrainian invasion of Russia, the demented U.S. President Joseph Biden said the other day when asked about the fighting in Kursk, “I’ve spoken with my staff on a regular basis probably every four or five hours for the last six or eight days. And it’s — it’s creating a real dilemma for Putin.  And we’ve been in direct contact — constant contact with — with the Ukrainians.”  Do you think Kamala Harris was kept in the dark?

Now how do you think the Russians are going to respond?  How many red lines will they allow the U.S. to cross without massive retaliation?  And what kind of retaliation?

Switch then to the Middle East where the Iranians and their allies are preparing to retaliate to Israel’s attacks on their soil. No one knows when but it seems soon.  Something is coming and it won’t be pretty.  Will it then ignite a massive war in the region with the U.S. and Israel pitted against the region?  Will nuclear weapons be used?  Will the wars in Ukraine/Russia and the Middle East join into what will be called WW III?

While the U.S. continues to massively arm Israel, Russian is arming its ally Iran and likely training them in the use of those weapons as the U.S. is doing in Ukraine. The stage is set.  We enter the final act.

Natanyahu wants and needs war to survive.  So he thinks.  Psychotic killers always do.

The signs all point in one direction.  No one should be shocked if the worst comes to pass.

“Phone’ll jingle, door’ll knock, open the latch.”

If you have time.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Edward Curtin.

It also makes her think of Guatemala, where she grew up surrounded by plants. “It reminds me of working the earth there,” Morales said in Spanish. 

Tending to the peaceful community garden is a far cry from the harvesting Morales does for her livelihood. Ever since moving to the United States 16 years ago, Morales has been a farmworker at local nurseries and farms. She takes seasonal jobs that allow her the flexibility and income to care for her five children, who range from 18 months to 15 years old. 

This year, she picked blueberries until the season ended in May, earning $1 for every pound she gathered. On a good day, she earned about two-thirds of the state’s minimum hourly wage of $12. For that, Morales toiled in brutal heat, with little in the way of protection from the sun, pesticides, or herbicides. With scant water available, the risk of dehydration or heat stroke was never far from her mind. But these are the sorts of things she must endure to ensure her family is fed. “I don’t really have many options,” she said. 

Now, she’s grappling with rising food prices, a burden that isn’t relieved by state or federal safety nets. Her husband works as a roofer, but as climate change diminishes crop yields and intensifies extreme weather, there’s been less work for the two of them. They have struggled to cover the rent, let alone the family’s ballooning grocery bill. “It’s hard,” she said. “It’s really, really hot … the heat is increasing, but the salaries aren’t.” The Campesinos’ Garden helps fill in the gap between her wages and the cost of food.

Her story highlights a hidden but mounting crisis: The very people who ensure the rest of the country has food to eat are going hungry. Although no one can say for sure how many farmworkers are food insecure (local studies suggest it ranges from 52 to 82 percent), advocates are sure the number is climbing, driven in no small part by climate change. 

The 2.4 million or so farmworkers who are the backbone of America’s agricultural industry earn among the lowest wages in the country. The average American household spends more than $1,000 a month on groceries, an almost unimaginable sum for families bringing home as little as $20,000 a year, especially when food prices have jumped more than 25 percent since 2019. Grappling with these escalating costs is not a challenge limited to farmworkers, of course — the Department of Agriculture says getting enough to eat is a financial struggle for more than 44 million people. But farmworkers are particularly vulnerable because they are largely invisible in the American political system.

“When we talk about supply chains and food prices going up, we are not thinking about the people who are producing that food, or getting it off the fields and onto our plates,” said Nezahualcoyotl Xiuhtecutli. 

Xiuhtecutli works with the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition to protect farmworkers from the occupational risks and exploitation they face. Few people beyond the workers themselves recognize that hunger is a problem for the community, he said — or that it’s exacerbated by climate change. The diminished yields that can follow periods of extreme heat and the disruptions caused by floods, hurricanes, and the like inevitably lead to less work, further exacerbating the crisis.

There isn’t a lot of aid available, either. Enrolling in federal assistance programs is out of the question for the roughly 40 percent of farmworkers without work authorization or for those who fear reprisals or sanctions. Even those who are entitled to such help may be reluctant to seek it. In lieu of these resources, a rising number of advocacy organizations are filling the gaps left by government programs by way of food pantries, collaborative food systems, and community gardens across America.

“Even though [farmworkers] are doing this job with food, they still have little access to it,” said Xiuhtecutli. “And now they have to choose between paying rent, paying gas to and from work, and utilities, or any of those things. And food? It’s not at the top of that list.”

Historically, hunger rates among farmworkers, as with other low-income communities, have been at their worst during the winter due to the inherent seasonality of a job that revolves around growing seasons. But climate change and inflation have made food insecurity a growing, year-round problem. 

In September, torrential rain caused heavy flooding across western Massachusetts. The inundation decimated farmland already ravaged by a series of storms. “It impacted people’s ability to make money and then be able to support their families,” Claudia Rosales said in Spanish. “People do not have access to basic food.” 

As executive director of the Pioneer Valley Workers Center, Rosales fights to expand protections for farmworkers, a community she knows intimately. After immigrating from El Salvador, she spent six years working in vegetable farms, flower nurseries, and tobacco fields across Connecticut and Massachusetts, and knows what it’s like to experience food insecurity. She also understands how other exploitative conditions, such as a lack of protective gear or accessible bathrooms, can add to the stress of simply trying to feed a family. Rosales remembers how, when her kids got sick, she was afraid she’d get fired if she took them to the doctor instead of going to work. (Employers harassed her and threatened to deport her if she tried to do anything about it, she said.) The need to put food on the table left her feeling like she had no choice but to tolerate the abuse. 

“I know what it’s like, how much my people suffer,” said Rosales. “We’re not recognized as essential … but without us, there would not be food on the tables across this country.”

The floodwaters have long since receded and many farms are once again producing crops, but labor advocates like Rosales say the region’s farmworkers still have not recovered. Federal and state disaster assistance helps those with damaged homes, businesses, or personal property, but does not typically support workers. Under federal law, if agricultural workers with a temporary visa lose their job when a flood or storm wipes out a harvest, they are owed up to 75 percent of the wages they were entitled to before the disaster, alongside other expenses. They aren’t always paid, however. “Last year, there were emergency funds because of the flooding here in Massachusetts that never actually made it to the pockets of workers,” Rosales said. 

The heat wave that recently scorched parts of Massachusetts likely reduced worker productivity and is poised to trigger more crop loss, further limiting workers’ ability to make ends meet. “Climate-related events impact people economically, and so that then means limited access to food and being able to afford basic needs,” said Rosales, forcing workers to make difficult decisions on what they spend their money on — and what they don’t.

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The impossible choice between buying food or paying other bills is something that social scientists have been studying for years. Research has shown, for example, that low-income families often buy less food during cold weather to keep the heat on. But climate change has given rise to a new area to examine: how extreme heat can trigger caloric and nutritional deficits. A 2023 study of 150 countries revealed that unusually hot weather can, within days, create higher risks of food insecurity by limiting the ability to earn enough money to pay for groceries. 

It’s a trend Parker Gilkesson Davis, a senior policy analyst studying economic inequities at the nonprofit Center for Law and Social Policy, is seeing escalate nationwide, particularly as utility bills surge. “Families are definitely having to grapple with ‘What am I going to pay for?’” she said. “People, at the end of the month, are not eating as much, having makeshift meals, and not what we consider a full meal.” Federal programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, are designed to help at times like these. More than 41 million people nationwide rely on the monthly grocery stipends, which are based on income, family size, and some expenses. But one national survey of nearly 3,700 farmworkers found just 12.2 percent used SNAP. Many farmworkers and migrant workers do not qualify because of their immigration status, and those who do often hesitate to use the program out of fear that enrolling could jeopardize their status. Even workers with temporary legal status like a working visa, or those considered a “qualified immigrant,” typically must wait five years before they can begin receiving SNAP benefits. Just six states provide nutrition assistance to populations, like undocumented farmworkers, ineligible for the federal program.

The expiration of COVID-era benefit programs, surging food costs, and international conflicts last year forced millions more Americans into a state of food insecurity, but no one can say just how many are farmworkers. That’s because such data is almost nonexistent — even though the Agriculture Department tracks annual national statistics on the issue. Lisa Ramirez, the director of the USDA’s Office of Partnerships and Public Engagement, acknowledged that the lack of data on hunger rates for farmworkers should be addressed on a federal level and said there is a “desire” to do something about it internally. But she didn’t clarify what specifically is being done. “We know that food insecurity is a problem,” said Ramirez, who is a former farmworker herself. “I wouldn’t be able to point to statistics directly, because I don’t have [that] data.” 

Without that insight, little progress can be made to address the crisis, leaving the bulk of the problem to be tackled by labor and hunger relief organizations nationwide.

“My guess is it would be the lack of interest or will — sort of like a willful ignorance — to better understand and protect these populations,” said social scientist Miranda Carver Martin, who studies food justice and farmworkers at the University of Florida. “Part of it is just a lack of awareness on the part of the general public about the conditions that farmworkers are actually working in. And that correlates to a lack of existing interest or resources available to build an evidence base that reflects those concerns.”

The lack of empirical information prevented Martin and her colleagues Amr Abd-Elrahman and Paul Monaghan from creating a tool that would identify the vulnerabilities local farmworkers experience before and after a disaster. “What we’ve found is that the tool that we dreamed of, that would sort of comprehensively provide all this data and mapping, is not feasible right now, given the dearth of data,” she noted.

However, Martin and her colleagues did find, in a forthcoming report she shared with Grist, that language barriers often keep farmworkers from getting aid after an extreme weather event. Examining the aftermath of Hurricane Idalia, they found cases of farmworkers in Florida trying, and failing, to get food at emergency stations because so many workers spoke Spanish and instructions were written only in English. She suspects the same impediments may hinder post-disaster hunger relief efforts nationwide.

Martin also believes there is too little focus on the issue, in part because some politicians demonize immigrants and the agriculture industry depends upon cheap labor. It is easier “to pretend that these populations don’t exist,” she said. “These inequities need to be addressed at the federal level. Farmworkers are human beings, and our society is treating them like they’re not.”

Tackling hunger has emerged as one of the biggest priorities for the Pioneer Valley Workers Center that Claudia Rosales leads. Her team feeds farmworker families in Massachusetts through La Despensa del Pueblo, a food pantry that distributes food to roughly 780 people each month.

The nonprofit launched the pantry in the winter of 2017. When the pandemic struck, it rapidly evolved from a makeshift food bank into a larger operation. But the program ran out of money last month when a key state grant expired, sharply curtailing the amount of food it can distribute. The growing need to feed people also has limited the organization’s ability to focus on its primary goal of community organizing. Rosales wants to see the food bank give way to a more entrepreneurial model that offers farmworkers greater autonomy. 

“For the long term, I’d like to create our own network of cooperatives owned by immigrants, where people can go and grow and harvest their own food and products and really have access to producing their own food and then selling their food to folks within the network,” she said. 

Mónica Ramírez, founder of the national advocacy organization Justice for Migrant Women, is developing something very much like that in Ohio. Ramírez herself hails from a farmworker family. “Both of my parents started working in the fields as children,” she said. “My dad was eight, my mom was five.” Growing up in rural Ohio, Ramírez remembers visiting the one-room shack her father lived in while picking cotton in Mississippi, and spending time with her grandparents who would “pile on a truck” each year and drive from Texas to Ohio to harvest tomatoes and cucumbers all summer. 

The challenges the Ramírez family faced then persist for others today. Food security has grown so tenuous for farmworkers in Fremont, Ohio, where Justice for Migrant Women is based, that the organization has gone beyond collaborating with organizations like Feeding America to design its own hyperlocal food system. These hunger relief efforts are focused on women in the community, who Ramírez says usually face the biggest burdens when a household does not have enough money for food.

Migrant women, she said, “bear the stress of economic insecurity and food insecurity, because they are the ones who are organizing their families and making sure their families have food in the house.”

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Later this month, Ramírez and her team will launch a pilot program out of their office that mimics a farmers market — one in which farmworkers and migrant workers will be encouraged to pick up food provided by a local farmer, at no charge. That allows those visiting the food bank to feel empowered by choice instead of being handed a box with preselected goods, and they hope it will alleviate hunger in a way that preserves a sense of agency for families in need.

Although federal lawmakers have begun at least considering protecting workers from heat exposure and regulators are making progress on a national heat standard, so far there’s been no targeted legislative or regulatory effort to address food insecurity among farmworkers. 

In fact, legislators may be on the verge of making things worse.

In May, the Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives Agriculture Committee passed a draft farm bill that would gut SNAP and do little to promote food security. It also would bar state and local governments from adopting farmworker protection standards regulating agricultural production and pesticide use, echoing legislation Florida recently passed. The inclusion of such a provision is “disappointing,” said DeShawn Blanding, a senior Washington representative at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit advocacy organization. He hopes to see the version that eventually emerges from the Democrat-controlled Senate, where it remains stalled, incorporate several other proposed bills aimed at protecting farmworkers and providing a measure of food security.

Those include the Voice for Farm Workers Act, which would shore up funding for several established farmworker support initiatives and expand resources for the Agriculture Department’s farmworker coordinator. This position was created to pinpoint challenges faced by farmworkers and connect them with federal resources, but it has not been “adequately funded and sustained,” according to a 2023 USDA Equity Commission report. Another bill would create an office within the Agriculture Department to act as a liaison to farm and food workers.
These bills, introduced by Democratic Senator Alex Padilla of California, would give lawmakers and policymakers greater visibility into the needs and experiences of farmworkers. But the greatest benefit could come from a third proposal Padilla reintroduced, the Fairness for Farm Workers Act. It would reform the 1938 law that governs the minimum wage and overtime policies for farmworkers while exempting them from labor protections.

“As food prices increase, low-income workers are facing greater rates of food insecurity,” Padilla told Grist. “But roughly half of our nation’s farmworkers are undocumented and unable to access these benefits.” He’d like to see an expedited pathway to citizenship for the over 5 million essential workers, including farmworkers, who lack access to permanent legal status and social safety benefits. “More can be done to address rising food insecurity rates for farmworkers.”

Still, none of these bills squarely addresses farmworker hunger. Without a concerted approach, these efforts, though important, kind of miss the point, Mónica Ramírez said. 

“I just don’t think there’s been a fine point on this issue with food and farmworkers,” she said. “To me it’s kind of ironic. You would think that would be a starting point. What will it take to make sure that the people who are feeding us, who literally sustain us, are not themselves starving?”

For 68-year-old Jesús Morales, the Campesinos’ Garden in Apopka is a second home. Drawing on his background studying alternative medicine in Jalisco, Mexico, he’s been helping tend the land for the last three years. He particularly likes growing and harvesting moringa, which is used in Mexico to treat a range of ailments. Regular visitors know him as the “plant doctor.” 

“Look around. This is the gift of God,” Morales said in Spanish. “This is a meadow of hospitals, a meadow of medicines. Everything that God has given us for our health and well-being and for our happiness is here, and that’s the most important thing that we have here.”

He came across the headquarters of the state farmworker organization when it hosted free English classes, then learned about its garden. Although it started a decade ago, its purpose has expanded over the years to become a source of food security and sovereignty for local farmworkers. 

The half-acre garden teems with a staggering assortment of produce. Tomatoes, lemons, jalapeños. Nearby trees offer dragonfruit and limes, and there’s even a smattering of papaya plants. The air is thick with the smell of freshly dug soil and hints of herbs like mint and rosemary. Two compost piles sit side by side, and a greenhouse bursts with still more produce. Anyone who visits during bi-monthly public gardening days is encouraged to plant their own seeds and take home anything they care to harvest. 

“The people who come to our community garden, they take buckets with them when they can,” said Ernesto Ruiz, a research coordinator at the Farmworker Association of Florida who oversees the garden. “These are families with six kids, and they work poverty wages. … They love working the land and they love being out there, but food is a huge incentive for them, too.”

Throughout the week, the nonprofit distributes what Ruiz harvests. The produce it so readily shares is supplemented by regular donations from local supermarkets, which Ruiz often distributes himself.

But some of the same factors driving farmworkers to hunger have begun to encroach on the garden. Blistering summer heat and earlier, warmer springs have wiped out crops, including several plots of tomatoes, peppers, and cantaloupes. “A lot of plants are dying because it’s so hot, and we’re not getting rains,” said Ruiz. The garden could also use new equipment — the irrigation system is manual while the weed whacker is third-rate, often swapped out for a machete — and funding to hire another person to help Ruiz increase the amount of food grown and expand when the garden is open to the public.

Demand is rising, and with it, pressure to deliver. Federal legislation addressing the low wages that lead to hunger for many farmworkers across the country is a big part of the solution, but so are community-based initiatives like the Campesinos’ Garden, according to Ruiz. “You do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do,” he said. “It’s always the right thing to feed somebody. Always.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The people who feed America are going hungry on Jul 17, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Ayurella Horn-Muller.

Janine Jackson interviewed the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights‘ Ahmad Abuznaid about the Rafah invasion for the May 10, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

New York Times (5/8/24)

Janine Jackson: Beltway reporters have access to things others can’t see, but can they see things that aren’t there? That question was brought to mind by a May 8 piece by New York Times chief White House reporter Peter Baker, in which he interpreted Biden’s evident decision to “pause” delivery of certain types of bombs to Israel as “meant to convey a powerful signal that his patience has limits.”

Israel’s plans to storm the southern Gaza city of Rafah, Baker explains, “have been a source of intense friction with the Biden administration for months.” That friction was evidently expressed in the unfettered delivery of weapons during those months, and the publicly expressed support for the catastrophic violence that has killed, maimed, orphaned and displaced millions of Palestinians, destroyed their homes and infrastructure, and denied their access to humanitarian aid.

Others, more focused on actions than vibes, saw this step as “overdue but necessary,” if it is part of some serious effort to condition any US support for Israel on ending the bloodshed.

Ahmad Abuznaid is executive director at the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights. He joins us now by phone from DC. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Ahmad Abuznaid.

Ahmad Abuznaid: Thank you, Janine. Thanks for having me.

JJ: An invasion of Rafah, we were told, would be an uncrossable “red line” for Biden, but luckily enough, a New York Times headline says, “Attack Not Seen as Full Invasion”—“seen as” being the kind of slippery language media use to suggest something they’d rather not say: that only some people’s definitions matter. What do we know about what’s happening in Rafah right now? Is it surprising, and why would we accept that it doesn’t amount to invasion?

AP (5/5/24)

AA: Well, we shouldn’t accept that assessment. Israelis have been saying they’re going to invade Rafah, no matter what. They said they would continue with their “mission,” no matter what. Benjamin Netanyahu just gave a speech and said, despite any pressures or response from outside forces or international forums, Israel will continue.

So I think what’s really the question here is whether President Biden issued his red line in actual red or in pencil. We’re going to find out, because technicalities as to how they view the invasion of Rafah aside, not only has it already occurred, but they’ve clearly made the statement again that they’re going to continue. So I think, really, the ball is in President Biden’s court. Will he continue to be bullied around and told what to do by Netanyahu, or will he act like he’s the president of the US, and call for an end?

JJ: Is the pause, as it’s been called—some people have been saying he stopped giving weapons;  that’s not it. It’s been called a pause or a delay in the delivery of certain types of bombs. Is that meaningful? How meaningful is that?

AA: No, that’s not meaningful. And I’ll tell you why. Because in the last few months, there has been shipment after shipment after shipment to Israel. And so to now say that you would pause, or have paused, certain munitions is a little too little, too late. Israel may not, in fact, need what you paused in order to, again, conduct its invasion of Rafah.

So are you going to end the genocide, President Biden? That’s the central question. People aren’t asking for a pause right now. They’re asking for an end to the genocide, and an end to military weaponry to Israel. So it’s clear President Biden is still not reading the room.

JJ: Yeah, yeah. In general, it feels as though the options or the hopes are so tamped down. Ceasefire seems like the ultimate thing that we can call for, but ceasefire doesn’t bring people back to life. It doesn’t put Gazans back in their destroyed homes. I mean, obviously, cease fire, but where would that fit in with what else needs to happen?

AA: Yeah, I mean, the ceasefire is the most immediate demand, and that’s why if President Biden had made this threat via weapons months ago, there literally may have been thousands of lives saved. And so the ceasefire is still the first and most urgent demand, because we’re trying to save lives.

The people of Rafah are not only facing, again, the incredibly brutal and violent genocidal assaults, they’re also facing forced starvation. There was this huge conversation around aid trucks beginning to increase, and now here we are again with aid trucks essentially coming to a halt. So the genocide is real, and that’s the first and most important demand in this moment.

Ahmad Abuznaid: “We need to stop the bloodshed, stop the starvation, stop the siege. But beyond that, we need to make sure this can never happen again.”

But beyond that, after what the US taxpayer, after what the West, after what elected officials have witnessed, how can they continue to go back to the status quo of supporting the state of Israel, even if there’s a ceasefire? I would argue that it’s clear to most Americans at this point that the Israeli government cannot be trusted with our weapons. They’ve taken it so far at this point, with their genocidal conduct, there’s actually no turning back.

And so ceasefire fits in, again, prominently, because we need to stop the bloodshed, stop the starvation, stop the siege. But beyond that, we need to make sure this can never happen again, and to make sure this can never happen again, that means that the state of Israel must not receive any more US arms, period. The US should no longer protect Israel at the International Criminal Court, period. The US should no longer protect the state of Israel at the International Court of Justice, period.

These are all ways that Israel deserves to be isolated in this moment. And, in fact, many countries are already taking that necessary step. We’ve seen Colombia, for instance, cease any relations with the state of Israel, and that’s what’s required of the world right now, especially of the United States, a country that proclaims itself to be one of those leaders of the “free world,” and supportive of people’s self-determination and calls for freedom and justice. If the US is truly that, this is the moment to show it.

And so we’re way beyond the ceasefire. We need a ceasefire immediately, but we need to see some divestment from the Israeli apartheid state, divestment from the genocidal state, and sanctions on the genocidal apartheid state.

JJ: There’s a feeling that the masks are off. Legislators in this country aren’t saying, as they supply Israel with money and bombs and political shielding and international bodies, they aren’t saying, “We hope for peace, but it’s hard. And Israel is our friend.” They’re now saying, “If you don’t full-throatedly support Israel’s ethnic cleansing project, you’re a terrorist supporter, which by the way means you’re a terrorist, and we will see that you are treated accordingly.”

That sentiment has always been there, of course, but it’s still shocking what people are now OK saying out loud–and doing, like HR6408, legislation to define pro-Palestinian groups as terrorist-supporting, and strip their tax exempt status. How are groups like US Campaign for Palestinian Rights responding to these very overt and meaningful legislative threats?

Al Jazeera (6/22/22)

AA: Look, they’ve attempted to stifle BDS and criminalize boycotting of Israel. They’ve attempted to make people pay via loss of state-awarded contracts, and agreements, right? You would sign this pledge. We’ve seen, of course, lawsuits and lawfare utilized, such as the lawsuit that was levied against the US Campaign. And you know what? We fought that and we won.

And so this is actually another overreach, another violation of our constitutional rights, another mode of repression against Palestinian organizing and activism. But the fact of the matter is, this isn’t going to stop us. If they think that a piece of legislation like this is going to cause us to cease our advocacy, our activities, our organizing, our shutting it down for Palestine, then they’ve miscalculated. So what we’ll see is that this will be utilized by the state to attempt to repress and suppress the movement, just like the anti-BDS laws, just like these lawfare expeditions.

But it won’t stop. They won’t silence us, they won’t stop us, and if, at the end of the day, we have to suffer through losing tax-exempt status, I think the organizations that right now are doing anything they can to stop a genocide, I think they’ll gladly sacrifice tax-exempt status. But I hope it doesn’t come to that, because it’s clearly a violation of our First Amendment rights, and our constitutional rights to organize in this country.

JJ: It seems like something has fundamentally changed in terms of the US public, and of course we’re seeing it with college students, but it’s been there before. It feels like flailing on the part of the administration, and on the part of people who want an uncritical support for anything that Israel does, and want support for genocide. The students are just driving them mad. And yet there they are, still doing it. Does this feel like a shift to you? I know you’re not a psychic, but does it seem like something is changing?

Mother Jones (4/22/24)

AA: Oh, it’s absolutely changing. Millions of people have taken action in the last few months, and that’s been calls, letters, petitions, direct action, civil disobedience, marches, protests, rallies, birddogging, you name it. And now we see encampment, and the students, just like they rose up against the war in Vietnam, just like they rose up for the civil rights movement, just like they rose up against the war in Iraq, the students will continue to be just a huge, huge part of this movement.

And right now, they’re speaking clearly to this country, not only about Palestine, and our need to get a ceasefire and to divest. Their demands are super clear. They’re super prepared. They’re super disciplined and intentional. I’m so proud of them. But not only are they making these demands clear for us in relation to Palestine, they’re also giving us, in plain sight, a contradiction for us to understand and grapple with domestically.

Do we want continued militarization of police, not only in our communities, but on our college campuses? This is what we’re witnessing: riot gear, dispersal techniques used on our students at Ivy League institutions, at non–Ivy League institutions. Literally, the weight of policing being levied against students from the ages of 17 to 20.

And it’s not only a concern that we’re seeing this, obviously, under a supposed Democratic, progressive president; we can see that this is something we should be concerned about, not only now, but in the future here for this country, as we see this intense militarization of our college campuses.

JJ: Let me just say, to me, on some level, the media’s focus on “leverage,” that focus on “Joe is kind of irked at Bibi. Uh oh”—it feels condescending to me, this Great Man theory of history that’s going on. It’s a personal conversation between Joe Biden and Netanyahu. It seems to make a mockery of international law and of human rights, frankly. And I just wonder, what other lenses could media be using? What other things could media be focusing on, that would take it away from “there’s a personal fight between these two guys, and somehow millions of people are affected by it.”

AA: Yeah, I think what media can do is continue to center the horrific nature of this Israeli assault, this genocidal assault on Gaza, the statistics, the data, the stories, the devastation that we’re seeing in Rafah right now. I think centering those voices and that experience, and then thinking about, again, our role, is where the focus needs to be.

The conversations between President Biden and Benjamin Netanyahu are for them to have. What we’re asking for is action. And we’re not going to be satisfied with these leaks of displeasure or of tension or of fracturing friendships. This isn’t about friendships. This is about stopping a genocide. And unfortunately, right now, not only are we not stopping it, we’re arming it and supporting it.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Ahmad Abuznaid. He’s executive director at the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights. Thank you so much, Ahmad Abuznaid, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

AA: Thank you, Janine.

The post ‘Are You Going to End the Genocide, President Biden? That’s the Central Question’<br></em><span class='not-on-index' style='color:#000000; font-size: 23px; font-weight: normal; line-height: 25px; font-family: 'Open Sans','sans-serif'; padding-bottom: -10px;'>CounterSpin interview with Ahmad Abuznaid on Rafah invasion appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

The Supreme Court heard arguments this week about the legality of Idaho’s near-total abortion ban, which criminalizes the procedure in all circumstances unless the life of the parent is at risk. It’s the first such case to reach the high court since the conservative majority overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. A key issue is whether a state ban can take precedence over the federal right to receive emergency care, including an abortion. The Biden administration argued that Idaho’s law violates the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, or EMTALA. If the justices side with Idaho, it could have major implications for reproductive care and worsen racial disparities for healthcare in at least half a dozen other states with similar bans. “People are going to die,” warns Karen Thompson, legal director of the nonprofit advocacy group Pregnancy Justice. “They are going to be bleeding out in hospital rooms. They’re going to be dying from sepsis because doctors are not going to be able to make the choices that they need to make to give people the care that will save their lives in these emergency situations.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

The day the news axe fell: Presenters, insiders fear ‘huge blow for democracy’

The future of New Zealand’s media landscape is becoming clearer by the day, with confirmation that it will no longer feature one of the country’s big two TV news networks.

Warner Bros. Discovery has revealed that all of Newshub’s operations will be shut down, effective July 5. That includes the flagship 6pm bulletin, The AM Show, and the Newshub website.

294 staff are set to lose their jobs.

It’s also been confirmed that TVNZ’s programme Sunday will be cancelled, following yesterday’s announcement that Fair Go, as well as both 1News at Midday and 1News Tonight, are being canned in their current format.

New Zealand’s media industry has been rocked by the bleeding obvious which is that their failed ratings system for legacy media was always more art than science.

The NZ radio ratings system is a diary that you fill in every 15 minutes — which no one ever fills in properly.

The NZ newspaper ratings are opinion polls and the NZ TV ratings system is a magical 180 boxes that limits choice to whoever had the TV remote.

When the sales rep told the advertiser that 300,000 people would read, see, hear their advert, it was based on ratings systems that were flattering but not real.

With the ruthlessness of online audience measurement, advertisers could see exactly how many people were actually seeing their adverts, and the legacy media never adapted to this new reality.

What we see now is hollowed out journalism competing against social media hate algorithms designed to generate emotional responses rather than Fourth Estate accountability.

New Zealand has NEVER had the audience size to make advertising based broadcasting feasible, that’s why it’s always required a state broadcaster — with no Fourth Estate who will hold this hard right racist climate denying beneficiary bashing government to account?

Minister missing in action
Broadcasting Minister Melissa Lee has refused to support the Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill that Labour’s former minister Willie Jackson put forward that would at least force Google and Facebook to pay for the journalism they take for free.

Lee has been utterly hopeless and missing in action here — if “Democracy dies in darkness”, National are pulling the plug.

This government doesn’t want accountability, does it?

Instagram this year switched on a new filter to smother political debate and we know actual journalism has been smothered by the social media algorithms.

I don’t think that most people who get their information from their social media feeds understand they aren’t seeing the most important journalism but are in fact seeing the most inflammatory rhetoric to keep people outraged and addicted to doom scrolling.

When Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters does his big lie that the entire mainstream media were bribed because of a funding note by NZ on Air in regards to coverage of Māori issues for the Public Interest Journalism fund — which by the way was quickly clarified by NZ on Air as not an editorial demand — he conflates and maliciously spins and NZ’s democracy suffers.

Muddled TVNZ
Television New Zealand has always come across like a muddle. It aspires to be BBC public broadcasting yet has the commercial imperatives of any Crown Owned Enterprise. If Labour had merged TVNZ and RNZ and made TVNZ 1 commercial free so that the advertising revenue could cross over to Newshub, it would have rebuilt the importance of public broadcasting while actually regulating the broken free market.

When will we get a Labour Party that actually gives a damn about public broadcasting rather than pay lip service to it?

Ultimately Newshub’s demise is a story of ruthless transnational interests and geopolitical cultural hegemony.

Corporate Hollywood soft power wants to continue its cultural dominance as the South Pacific friction continues between the United States and China.

New Zealand is an important plank for American hegemony in the South Pacific and as China and American competition heats up, Warners Bros Discovery suddenly buying a large stake in our media was always a geopolitical calculation over a commercial one.

Cultural dominance doesn’t require nor want an active journalism, so they will keep the channel open purely as a means of dominating domestic culture without any of the Fourth Estate obligations.

That bitter angry feeling you have watching Warner Bros Discovery destroy our Fourth Estate is righteous.

Social licence trashed
They bought a media outlet that has had a 35-year history of being a structural part of our media environment and dumping it trashes their social licence in this country.

That feeling of rage you have watching a multibillion transnational vandalise our environment is going to be repeated the millisecond you see the American mining interests lining up to mine conservation land with all their promises to repair anything they break.

Remember — the transnational ain’t your friend regardless of its pronouns.

That person they rolled in with the soft-glazed CEO face to do the sad, sad crying is disingenuous and condescending.

Now Warner Bros has killed Newshub off, we have no option as Kiwis but to boycott whatever is left of TV3 and water down Warner Bros remaining interests altogether.

They’ve burnt their bridges with us in New Zealand by walking away from their social contract, we should have no troubles returning the favour!

The only winners here are rightwing politicians who don’t want their counterproductive and corrupt decisions to be scrutinised.

We are a poorer and weaker democracy after these news cuts.

Why bother having a Minister of Broadcasting if all they do is fiddle while the industry burns?

Welcome to your new media future in Aotearoa New Zealand . . .

Republished with permission from The Daily Blog.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

Longview, Washington. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

The converging crises facing our world today shout out the fact that their roots are systemic. Tinkering around the edges won’t solve these problems, because they are embedded in the systems logic itself. The climate crisis is the signature of this. While definite progress has been made in deploying low-carbon energy technologies, overall carbon pollution has continued to increase because of the systemic economic and political assumptions under which dominant institutions operate.

The same is true of the general crisis of ecological overshoot in which climate is a major factor but by no means the whole picture. Scientists led by the Stockholm Resilience Center have been looking at ecological boundaries which mark out the safe space for human civilization and the Earth as a whole. Last September they announced the results of the first-ever evaluation of all 9 processes that preserve stability and resilience. Six boundaries have already been breached including the condition of climate, land, water and the biosphere, as well as overloading of phosphorus and nitrogen, and introduction of novel entities such as microplastics and endocrine-disrupting chemicals. This all suggests, scientists wrote, “that Earth is now well outside the safe operating space for humanity.”

These facts underscore the necessity for transformative change in economic and political systems. Massive resources must be devoted to transforming the basic elements of human society, including how we gain energy and materials to produce goods and services, how we grow our food, how we get around, how we build our buildings, how we deal with waste products. That entails redirection in how we invest capital.

Two significant indicators that our world is not getting it are the dramatic accumulation of wealth upwards and record military spending. Over the past 4 years billionaire wealth in the U.S. alone has shot up 88%, from $2.9 trillion in 2020 to $5.5 trillion today. The top 10, led by Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, account for $1.4 trillion of that. Globally, as a 2022, the richest 1% owned 46% of world wealth. No doubt that percentage has increased since. Would the planet be going into ecological overshoot if these people were investing in a way that created a resilient future? Obviously, they’re not. Sure, some are putting money into low-carbon technologies and environmental philanthropy, but the overwhelming preponderance of their investments and businesses still propels overshoot. Whatever they are doing does not address the systemic roots of the crisis.

Meanwhile, world militaries gobbled a record $2.2 trillion in 2023, up 9% over 2022, and another record is expected in 2024, the International Institute for Strategic Studies reported. That no doubt is a lowball, since real spending by the largest military power, the U.S., was estimated at $1.5 trillion in 2022, double the nominal budget. All the while wars rage on in Europe, the Mideast and Africa, and direct conflict between great powers is predicted. The frightful words World War III are increasingly on people’s lips.

All this indicates a world desperately in need of transformative change is moving in the diametrically opposite direction. It’s enough to crush hope and leave people who care for the future in despair. Where do you gain leverage to change such an interlocked global system? We need a way to take hold and begin to put a new system in place.

Restoring the commons

The first step is to understand the essence of the systemic transformation that is required. The common thread in our multiple global crises is the elevation of narrow interests over the common good. Certainly, the crisis of ecological overshoot reflects blindness towards our dependence on the planetary commons. For instance, making the atmosphere a dump for fossil fuel pollution while cutting down forests and tearing up soils are major drivers of climate disruption. Increasing global conflict and military expenditures reflect putting national interests over those of the world as a whole, despite the threat of nuclear extermination. The obscene and increasing concentration of the world’s wealth in so few hands screams out the prevalence of private interests over the common good.

Thus, the necessity is to restore the balance in society by rebuilding our sense of the common good, and the institutional frameworks that express it. That is the core of the transformation that is required. Self-interest is a powerful factor in human life, and will remain so. It is a part of human nature. But we also have a strongly cooperative and social side that must be emphasized if we are to navigate our convergent crises.

Over the past 4 or 5 decades, a philosophy known as neoliberalism has prevailed. It is built on a belief that if we each pursue our own self-interest, it will result in optimal results for society. The record has proved this wrong. The crises cited above, ecological overshoot, increased global conflict, and widening disparity of wealth, all testify to the need to restore a sense of the common good and common enterprise.

Neoliberalism has downgraded and denied these necessities and the institutions we have created to promote the public good. The general diminishment of the public sector, with the widespread evasion of just taxation by the wealthy classes, is central to this.

On my home turf of Washington state, we have a poster.  We just lost a billionaire. That world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos, just evaded around a quarter-billion dollars in payments under a newly enacted state capital gains tax by moving his legal residence to Florida. This is a man whose Amazon wealth depends on deliveries through public road and aviation infrastructure, and whose computer-based business is built on digital innovation publicly funded during World War II and the Cold War.

Capture of public institutions by private interests is the other aspect of the neoliberal era that makes them so ineffective at dealing with our crises. The fossil fuel industry and allies such as big agriculture and railroads have frustrated sufficient action on climate. The military-industrial complex promotes conflict and war. The wealthy fight just taxation. The list could go on.

The balance to this situation is people power democratically organized to advocate for the common good. That is why we need leverage points where people power can begin to make change, to reinforce existing institutional frameworks and build new ones that promote the common good. We need to build resilient economies that address the imperative to come back within planetary boundaries while meeting basic human needs.

Restoring the common good in place

Inherent in the idea of the common good is community. Restoring the common good and restoring community are one and the same. This directs us to the logical place to begin the process, the communities in which we live. This is where we can begin the work of transformation, of putting new systems in place. Our communities are where we develop the deepest connections and sense of commonality. Our surroundings, the social and natural environments in which we live, are where we can best envision and work for the conditions that promote the common good.

A key insight is that you can’t change everything at once. You have to build a new system within the shell of the old, using elements of the old system that nonetheless embody the changes you want to make. In the case of building the future in place, local and subnational state and provincial governments are vital. These are the institutions charged with maintaining the public sphere, and powerful in crucial areas including transportation, building and zoning codes, public greenspaces, waste management, water supplies, pollution control, and economic development. In many areas they own energy utilities, while private utilities are regulated by state commissions. In other words, local and subnational jurisdictions play central roles in many of those areas requiring transformation. In fact, much of the progress made toward a more sustainable society has been accomplished at these governmental levels.

But we need something more. We need to coalesce a broader political movement with a vision for transformative change, and to reclaim capital flowing out of our communities for investment in public and community-based institutions that address basic human needs. We need a kind of evolutionary revolution that builds the common good, one which makes systemic, transformative changes in specific places, in that way building models and constituencies for changes on broader scales, creating networks that are both horizontal with other places and vertical up to national and global levels.

Many of these concepts go under the rubric of municipalism, a fundamental idea of which is not only leveraging existing governing institutions for change, but also creating a more participatory and inclusive context. This entails creating community assemblies or congresses that draw together diverse groups and movements to create visions for transformative change and build the political power to make them happen.

This strongly suggests that building a future based on the common good, on restoring community in place, begins by drawing together the many organized groups working for specific changes in localities into discussions aimed at coalescing their forces around a common agenda. One can envision stages beginning with conversations among group organizers leading to community congresses that agree on unified platforms and prioritize steps to realize them through work with local governments and civil society. Election of local officials who remain accountable to the will of community congresses, who will work to enact the agenda, is a key element. Many of these actions have already been modeled in places such as Barcelona, where for some years a civic movement made significant gains based on organizing through neighborhood and citywide assemblies. Though the movement there has seen setbacks, it still remains an influential model.

Beyond building a new political base, the key priority is to build a new economic base, one based on peace rather than war, which meets real human needs. That is why the growing movement for public banking is foundational. In the U.S., banking is largely a private enterprise built on bottom-line considerations. An exception is the state bank in North Dakota, a legacy of the populist era. So individuals, businesses and governments keep their money in institutions that send it around the world in search of the greatest profit opportunities, often undermining the interests of their depositors. Banks also have the power to create money, being able to lend beyond their reserves on the calculation most loans will be repaid.

A public banking system would treat money as a public utility, to be invested and created by social, economic and environmental criteria that promote the common good. Public banks created at local and subnational levels could fund public infrastructure, and eliminate interest paid to private banks. They could also fund needed community institutions such as social housing and worker coops. They could focus investments in areas crucial for sustainability at all levels, such as public transit, food production and distribution, clean energy, and materials recycling and recovery. Cities and states could become dynamic actors in building community-based economic institutions that meet needs where the private sector is falling short.

A political strategy for all seasons

Of course, such an agenda will be opposed by the same narrow private interests that obstruct progress at broader levels. Local business interests are powerful, and generally well organized and well funded. That is why we need coherent political movements with their own institutional infrastructures and visions and agendas for transformative change. The place such people power movements have the greatest potential to gain leverage is local areas. And where there are powerful local movements, the ability to move state and provincial governments is greatest. They can also coalesce into bioregional networks that build a new sense of identity and common purpose around place defined by nature.

Obviously, the multiple crises facing us require transformative change at all levels. The interest group politics that maintains a stranglehold on national governments must be dislodged. A new level of international cooperation must be achieved. These are necessities. Local focus allows us to build models that are truly transformative, and networks to spread them more widely and achieve broader gains. Local and regional communities are where people power politics can gain the most traction to begin re-balancing society and politics for community and the common good.

Ultimately, we need a politics for all seasons, one that can address all exigencies, a no-regrets political strategy that prepares for worst case scenarios, within reason, but which will work and provide gains under all scenarios. One which provides effective routes for transformative change through people power organizing. Which begins to re-balance who has power in society, turning around the trend to increased concentration of economic and political power by distributing power more widely. And which effectively addresses our convergent crises by beginning to restore the common good in economy and society.

Many fear, and even consider inevitable, that systemic collapse will be upon us in coming years. Ecologically, in the form of intensifying climate disruption and connected breakdowns of vital systems such as food production. Economically, in the form of a new great depression. Politically, in the form of deepening social conflicts and electoral outcomes that push national unity beyond the breaking point. All this speaks to the need to build strong, resilient communities. A political strategy that builds a future based on the common good beginning in the places where we live can meet this need, and potentially help avert worst case scenarios.

If humanity survives the current age, it will be recalled how we as a species navigated a time of great disruption on multiple levels. Certainly, we will have left a legacy of disrupted climate and ecosystems. We will have experienced consequences that are now unavoidable, but will somehow have avoided total civilizational collapse and nuclear warfare. I believe that when that story is told, it will be one of rediscovery of the common good, building a future based on community, human solidarity and mutual aid. Begining by building the future in place.

This first appeared on The Raven.

The post A World Going in the Wrong Direction appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Patrick Mazza.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

A characteristic of the hegemonic political and media culture of the United States is the near invisibility of social class as a major determinant of power. Race and gender have finally started to attract attention in the political and media establishments, but social class appears either ignored or silenced. The dominant establishments depict the U.S. as if it is a classless society, where because of ample opportunities and a large degree of social and vertical mobility, it is possible for everyone to rise from the bottom of society to the top. The evidence, however, shows that the United States has social classes (with a social class structure not dissimilar to the ones that exist in most countries on both sides of the North Atlantic, which, incidentally, have more extensive social mobility than in the U.S.). Moreover, there is plenty of evidence that each social class in the U.S. has its own economic, social, and cultural interests, expressed and promoted through their influence over the U.S. political institutions, advancing those policies that increase or reduce, for example, the huge social class health and quality of life inequalities that exist in this country, the largest among developed capitalist countries. Class health inequalities in the U.S. are also larger than race and gender inequalities, a reality that rarely appears in the dominant political and media discourse.

Another reality is that there are not only social classes, but there has also been an increased polarization of the class structure of the U.S. with a growing concentration of economic, political, and social power wielded by the dominant and upper class (known in the U.S. as the corporate class) at the cost of disempowering the popular classes, particularly the working class and the lower echelons of the middle class. What is also interesting (but rarely mentioned in the major media) is that, according to the most detailed study of popular perceptions of class in the U.S., the majority of people in the U.S. are and define themselves as belonging to the working class (for further elaboration of these points, see Vicente Navarro, What is happening in the United States; How social classes influence the political life of the country and its health and quality of life.

International Journal of Social Determinants of Health and Health Services, April 51(2), 2021).

The widely reproduced perception that the majority of the working population is middle class, as even President Biden mentioned in his State of the Union address, is inaccurate and is based on a biased survey that asked people to define themselves either as upper, middle, or lower class. The term lower class is derogatory and insulting, and very few people choose to define themselves as lower class. The occupational groups used by the General Social Survey (GSS) give an idea of classes in the U.S.: The corporate class includes corporate owners and managers; the middle class is comprised of professionals and technicians, business middle class and executives, self-employed shopkeepers, craftsmen and artisans; and the working class (the largest social class) includes manual workers, service workers, clerical and sales workers, and farm workers.

HOW THE CURRENT SOCIAL CLASS POWER RELATIONS PRODUCES AND REPRODUCES RACISM IN THE U.S.

As mentioned before, there are other categories of power, such as race and gender, that also have enormous importance in shaping the distribution of power in the U.S. and that are currently the center of attention in health equity circles. I consider these developments extraordinarily positive and necessary. However, not much attention has been given in those same circles to the category of social class, which is regrettable for many reasons. It is impossible, for example, to eliminate racism in the United States without understanding how racism is produced and reproduced in the country and the role it plays in dividing and weakening the working class in the defense of their interests, frequently in conflict with the corporate class. It is not by chance that the most ultra-right-wing parties, who actively promote the interests of the corporate class, also promote the most racist ideologies.

On the other hand, the relationship between the civil rights movement and the labor movement in the U.S. is precisely based on their commonality of interests. It was none other than Martin Luther King who, one week before being assassinated and while he was supporting a worker’s strike, said that the “class conflict was the critical conflict in the U.S.” (cited in, D. J. Garrow, The FBI and Martin Luther King; Penguin Books, 1981). Martin Luther King had been extremely critical of many labor laws, such as the profoundly anti-worker “right to work” laws that make it extremely difficult to establish a union. They were adopted in many states in the 1950s to stop the civil and labor rights movements that were growing at that time. In 1961, Martin Luther King defined such legislation as “a law to rob us of our civil rights and job rights, to destroy labor unions and the freedom of collective bargaining by which unions have improved wages and the working conditions of everyone. Wherever these laws have been passed, wages are lower, job opportunities are fewer, and there are no civil rights” (cited in Daryl Newman, President of the Detroit AFL-CIO, Remembering the racist history of right to work laws, Portside, February 28, 2024). It shows the enormous power of the corporate class that such a racist and anti-labor law was in place in Michigan (historically one of the most industrialized states) for 60 years until it was finally repealed this year, just a few weeks ago (February 13). Because racism is continuously and fundamentally used to divide the working class, the elimination of racism would benefit most of the population. The overwhelming power of the corporate class is based on the weakness of the working class, facilitated and reproduced by the lack of class solidarity and the existence of racism.

THE ENORMOUS AND URGENT NEED TO ESTABLISH CLASS-BASED ALLIANCES AND COALITIONS

It is because of this reality that there has always been a need for all the groups that are exploited and discriminated against (by race, gender, age, nationality, and other categories) to work together in common cause for the elimination of injustice. This is what occurred in the 1980s with the establishment of the Rainbow Coalition, which was created under the leadership of one of the disciples of Martin Luther King, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, to whom I was health advisor in his 1984 and 1988 campaigns for the Democratic presidential nomination. Jesse Jackson ran as the voice of the minorities in 1984 (his slogan was “Our time has come”).

However, after the establishment of the Rainbow Coalition, he ran as the “voice of the working people” of all colors, black, brown, yellow, white, and whatever color, identity, and sensitivities.

The coalition included the civil rights movement, the trade union movement, the feminist movement, and the elderly movement, among others, making proposals to reduce and eliminate injustice and exploitation. An element that facilitated the establishment of such a coalition is that the majority of African Americans, Latinos, and other minorities, women, and the elderly are members of the working class, which also includes those echelons of the middle class that have been proletarianized with the increased dominance of for-profit corporations in sectors, like health and medicine, that were previously non-profit oriented. Therefore, social class became a connecting link among diverse groups.

In this strategy, race, for example, was not replaced by class, but rather, it was enriched by adding the category of class to race. The class solidarity needed by the different components of the coalition to reach their objectives was (and continues to be) incompatible with the existence of racism. In summary, social movements need a coalition that strengthens the possibility of obtaining their goals. This is what the Rainbow Coalition intended in 1988, and it succeeded. It introduced proposals that considerably impacted the country’s political debate. In the health sector, one of their most important proposals was for the establishment of a National Health Program, a universal program that would guarantee access to health care to all citizens and residents in the country in the same way, for example, that Medicare guarantees health care to all the elderly. (In the current terminology, the phrase Medicare for All is a demand for that right to universality.) The impact of Jesse Jackson’s proposals, like the one for a National Health Program, was enormous and mobilized many sectors of the working population. Jesse Jackson almost won the Democratic primary in 1988, shaking up the Democratic Party apparatus that was surprised and afraid of that movement.

THE OVERWHELMING POLITICAL POWER OF THE CORPORATE CLASS IS AN OBSTACLE TO SOLVING SOME OF THE U.S.’S MAJOR HEALTH INEQUITIES.

In the 1992 presidential election, Bill Clinton prominently included a proposal in his Democratic primary campaign for changes in the health sector, trying to capitalize on the interest in the subject that had been awakened in the late 1980s by the Rainbow Coalition’s advocacy for a National Health Program. He later established a Commission presided over by Hillary Clinton to make proposals to improve access to health care. However, he completely excluded the possibility of establishing a National Health Program, which is why Reverend Jackson, President of the Rainbow Coalition, Dennis Rivera, the President of 1199 SEIU, the most important union of healthcare workers in the U.S., and myself, health advisor to the Rainbow Coalition, went tosee Hillary Clinton to complain about that absence. Reverend Jackson asked that I be included in their Task Force, so for a year, I worked in the White House as part of that Task Force without having any influence. It was clear from the beginning that there was no chance that a National Health Program could even be considered despite being favored by most of the population. A key condition of the White House Task Force was that their proposals needed to be approved by the Senate and the House Health Committees. But many members of those and other especially relevant committees received campaign funding from corporate interests dominant in the health sector (from insurance companies to pharmaceutical companies, among many others) who put profits above human needs. In this context, a National Health Program was not even allowed to be considered. That complete rejection was a clear example of corporate class dominance of the political process. Consequently, the U.S. is one of the few countries on both sides of the North Atlantic that does not guarantee access to health care for citizens or residents.

THE HISTORICAL ROOTS OF HEALTH INEQUITY AND THE RISE OF FOR-PROFIT HEALTHCARE IN THE AFTERMATH OF WORLD WAR II

Corporate dominance of the health sector was legally established in the U.S. immediately after World War II. That war was among the few popular wars the U.S. government has ever fought.

It was a war against fascism and Nazism (maximum expressions of classism, racism, and sexism) led by an immensely popular and progressive president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Furthermore, the popular classes played a crucial role in that war. As a consequence, the demands from the majority of the population were very high after the war, with calls for significant changes such as the nationalization of banking and, in the health sector, the establishment of a National Health Program (as happened later on in Canada when the Social

Democratic Party established a universal health care system in a western province where it governed, which was later on expanded to the whole country). In the U.S., the rising demand for change, including in the health sector, frightened the dominant corporate class, which mobilized to stop reforms that would affect their interests. The corporate class, through the Republican party and the right-wing racist members of the Southern Democratic Party, united to pass the Taft-Harley Act (despite President Truman’s veto), which included a measure that weakened the labor movement by outlawing sympathy strikes. In other words, the unions could not function as class agents but were required to limit their organizing to their sectors and places of work. A blue-collar workers union, for example, could not strike in support of a service workers union. This was a way of dividing the working class, disallowing them to work together.

In other words, class solidarity was forbidden. The federal government of the U.S. is one of the few governments among developed democratic countries that prohibits sympathy strikes. In contrast, general strikes that paralyzed the whole economy occurred in several European countries during the tumultuous years of the Great Recession. The enormous power of the corporate class at the expense of the working class (the majority of the population in the U.S.) is one of the major causes of the dramatic underdevelopment of social and health rights in this country. The data clearly shows that on both sides of the North Atlantic, those countries where political parties have been historically rooted in the working class or labor parties, have much better equity and health indicators than those with very weak or no labor parties, like the U.S.Plenty of evidence supports this statement (Vicente Navarro and Leiyu Shi The Political Context of Social Inequalities and Health Inequalities Social Science and Medicine, Vol 52, 2001).

It is important to note that this same law, the Taft-Hartley Act that weakened and undermined the labor movement in the U.S., was also the law that established the regressive and fragmented basis for the funding of health care in the U.S., leading to the inevitable rise of inequities in access to health care. Instead of establishing a National Health Program (as Canada would later), the U.S. federal government promoted employers’ voluntary purchase of private health insurance plans, making people’s access to care dependent on their employer’s willingness and ability to provide coverage. In other words, when a worker is fired, they not only lose their salary but also their (and their family members’) medical care benefits. This form of control over employees is unknown in most other countries on both sides of the North Atlantic. It also explains why the number of working days lost because of strikes in the U.S. is among the lowest.

Not only did the Taft-Hartley Act strengthen the corporate class’s control over the labor force in each workplace, but it also promoted the rapid privatization of healthcare, expanding enormously the for-profit health sector, which became dominant in major areas like insurance and pharmaceuticals, prioritizing the optimization of profits over human needs. The system also became highly inefficient, with enormous administrative costs. Again, it was for the benefit of corporate interests at the expense of most of the population. Thus, the same law that thwarted the labor movement established the foundation for enormous inequities and injustice in the U.S. healthcare system.

Based on all these facts, it should be evident that social class is a critical variable in understanding what has been happening in the U.S. The enormous limitations of social rights and labor rights, as well as the very limited democracy in their representative institutions, are based primarily on the immense power of the corporate class, much greater than in any other major democratic country, and the overwhelming weakness of the working class, the weakest in any major democratic country. The lack of attention to this reality in the political media and academic institutions is precisely a consequence of their dominance by the corporate class.

The post The Importance of Social Class as a Power Category Besides Race and Gender to Understand What is Going on in the US appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Vicente Navarro.

Tim Judson is Executive Director of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service (N.I.R.S.). Mr. Judson leads N.I.R.S.’ work on nuclear reactor and climate change issues, and has written a series of reports on nuclear bailouts and sustainable energy. He is Chair of the Board of Citizens Awareness Network, one of the lead organizations in the successful campaign to close the Vermont Yankee reactor, and co-founder of Alliance for a Green Economy in New York.

Listeners should know that this very complex system called the nuclear fuel cycle—that starts with uranium mines out west piling up radioactive tailings, which have exposed people downwind to radioactive hazards…And then they have to enrich the uranium—and that is often done by burning coal, which pollutes the air and contributes to climate disruption. And then they have to fabricate the fuel rods and build the nuclear plants. And then they have to make sure that these nuclear plants are secure against sabotage. And then you have the problem of transporting—by trucks or rail—radioactive waste to some depositories that don't exist. And they have to go through towns, cities, and villages. And what is all this for? It's to boil water. 

Ralph Nader

In 2021 and 2022, when the big infrastructure bills— the bipartisan infrastructure bill and the Inflation Reduction Act—were being passed by Congress, the utility industry spent $192 million on federal lobbying in those two years. That's more than the oil industry spent in those two years on lobbying. These are the utility companies that are present in every community around the country. And their business is actually less in selling electricity and natural gas, and more in lobbying state and federal governments to get their rates approved…The utility industry (and the nuclear industry as a subset of that) have been lobbying Congress relentlessly for years to protect what they've got.

Tim Judson

Fusion is one of these technologies that's always been 30 years away. Whenever there's an announcement about an advancement in fusion research, it's still “going to be 30 years before we get a reactor going.” Now there's a lot more hype, and these tech investors are putting money into fusion with the promise that they're going to have a reactor online in a few years. But there's no track record to suggest that that's going to happen. It keeps the dream of nuclear alive— “We could have infinite amounts of clean energy for the future.” It sounds too good to be true. It's always proven to be too good to be true.

Tim Judson

One of the lines that they're using to promote theAtomic Energy Advancement Act and all of these investments in nuclear… is that we can't let Russia and China be the ones that are expanding nuclear energy worldwide. It's got to be the US that does it.

Tim Judson

In Case You Haven’t Heard with Francesco DeSantis

News 3/12/24

1. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency, or UNRWA, has released a report claiming that “employees released into Gaza from Israeli detention [were] pressured by Israeli authorities into falsely stating that the agency has Hamas links and that staff took part in the October 7 attacks,” per the Times of Israel. These supposed admissions of guilt led to the United States and many European countries cutting off or delaying aid to the agency. The unpublished report alleges that UNRWA staffers were “detained by the Israeli army, and…experienced…severe physical beatings, waterboarding, and threats of harm to family members.” The report goes on to say “In addition to the alleged abuse endured by UNRWA staff members, Palestinian detainees more broadly described allegations of abuse, including beatings, humiliation, threats, dog attacks, sexual violence, and deaths of detainees denied medical treatment.”

2. Continuing the genocidal assault on Gaza, Israel has been bombing the densely populated city of Rafah in the South. Domestically, this seems to be too far for even Biden’s closest allies, with the AP reporting just before the assault that “[Senator Chris] Coons…of Delaware, called for the U.S. to cut military aid to Israel if Netanyahu goes ahead with a threatened offensive on the southern city of Rafah without significant provisions to protect the more than 1 million civilians sheltering there. [And Senator] Jack Reed, head of the Senate Armed Services Committee, appealed to Biden to deploy the U.S. Navy to get humanitarian aid to Gaza. Biden ally Sen. Tim Kaine challenged the U.S. strikes on the Houthis as unlikely to stop the Red Sea attacks. And the most senior Democrat in the Senate [Patty Murray of Washington] called for Israel to ‘change course.’” Hewing to these voices within his party, President Biden declared that an invasion of Rafah would be a “red line.” Yet POLTICO reports that Israeli PM Netanyahu “says he intends to press ahead with an invasion.” POLTICO now reports that Biden is threatening to condition military aid to Israel in response to Netanyahu’s defiance, but it remains to be seen whether the president will follow through on this threat.

3. POLITICO also reports that CIA Director Bill Burns is calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, saying “The reality is that there are children who are starving…They’re malnourished as a result of the fact that humanitarian assistance can’t get to them. It’s very difficult to distribute humanitarian assistance effectively unless you have a ceasefire.” This is obviously correct, and illustrates how out of touch the Democratic Party is that they are getting outflanked on peace issues by the literal director of the CIA.

4. Whether unwilling – or unable – to change course on Gaza, President Biden is paying the electoral price. In last week’s Super Tuesday primaries, the Nation reports “Uncommitted” won 19 percent of the vote and 11 delegates in Minnesota, 29 percent and seven delegates in Hawaii, and 12.7 percent in North Carolina. This week, the New York Times reports Uncommitted took 7.5% – nearly 50,000 votes – in Washington State. Biden also lost the caucus in American Samoa, making him the first incumbent president since Carter to lose a nominating contest, per Newsweek.

5. In yet another manifestation of opposition to the genocide in Gaza, Jewish director Jonathan Glazer used his Oscar acceptance speech to “[denounce] the bloodshed in the Middle East and [ask] the audience to consider how it could ‘resist…dehumanization,’” per NBC. Glazer’s award winning film “The Zone of Interest” examines how “[a] Nazi commandant…and his family…attempt to build an idyllic life right outside the walls of the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland during the Holocaust.” Glazer said “All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present — not to say, 'Look what we did then,' rather, 'Look what we do now.' Our film shows where dehumanization leads at its worst…Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation, which has led to conflict for so many people." Glazer was the most forthright in his criticism of the Israeli campaign, but NBC notes “Billie Eilish, Mark Ruffalo and Ramy Youssef wore red pins on the Oscars red carpet symbolizing calls for a cease-fire.”

6. Aware that they are losing the public relations battle, pro-Israel lobbying groups like the UJA-Federation and the Jewish Community Relations Council have enlisted Right-wing messaging guru Frank Luntz to help with their Hasbara PR, the Grayzone reports. Leaked talking points from his presentation run the gamut from playing up unsubstantiated claims of systematic sexual violence committed by Hamas to acknowledging that “’The most potent’ tactic in mobilizing opposition to Israel’s assault…‘is the visual destruction of Gaza and the human toll’… [because] ‘It ‘looks like a genocide’.”

7. Turning from Palestine to East Palestine, Ohio Cleveland.com reports that during a recent Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee hearing, National Transportation Safety Board  Chair Jennifer L. Homendy told Ohio’s junior Senator JD Vance that “The deliberate burn of rail cars carrying hazardous chemicals after last year’s crash…wasn’t needed to avoid an explosion because the rail cars were cooling off before they were set on fire.” In a statement, Ohio’s senior Senator, progressive Democrat Sherrod Brown, called the testimony “outrageous,” and said “This explosion – which devastated so many – was unnecessary…The people of East Palestine are still living with the consequences of this toxic burn. This is more proof that Norfolk Southern put profits over safety & cannot be trusted.”

8. In positive labor news, Bloomberg reports that “About 600 video game testers at Microsoft…’s Activision Blizzard studios have unionized, more than doubling the size of labor’s foothold at the software giant, according to the Communications Workers of America.” This brings the unionized workforce at Microsoft to approximately 1,000. To the company’s credit, Microsoft has been friendly towards unionization, a marked difference from other technology companies – namely Amazon and Tesla – which have gone to extreme lengths to prevent worker organizing.

9. In not so positive labor news, Matt Bruenig’s NLRB Edge reports “The ACLU Is Trying to Destroy the Biden NLRB.” In a narrow sense, this story is about the ACLU fighting its workers to preserve its internal mandatory arbitration process. More broadly however, Bruenig illustrates how the ACLU is seeking to oust Biden’s NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo – arguing her appointment was unconstitutional – which “could potentially invalidate everything the Biden Board has done.” This is yet another example of the non-profit industrial complex run amok, doing damage to progressive values and opting to possibly inflict economic harm on workers nationwide rather than treat their own workers fairly.

10. Finally, according to the Corporate Crime Reporter, “Boeing whistleblower John Barnett was found dead in his truck at a hotel in Charleston, South Carolina after a break in depositions in a whistleblower retaliation lawsuit.” Barnett’s lawyer Brian Knowles told the paper “They found him in his truck dead from an ‘alleged’ self-inflicted gunshot.” Barnett had gone on record saying “[Boeing] started pressuring us to not document defects, to work outside the procedures, to allow defective material to be installed without being corrected. They started bypassing procedures and not maintaining configurement control of airplanes, not maintaining control of non conforming parts –  they just wanted to get the planes pushed out the door and make the cash register ring.” The timing and circumstances of Barnett’s death raise disturbing questions; we hope an exhaustive investigation turns up some answers.

This has been Francesco DeSantis, with In Case You Haven’t Heard.

This content originally appeared on Ralph Nader Radio Hour and was authored by Ralph Nader.

Janine Jackson interviewed Vox‘s Ian Millhiser about the Supreme Court’s protection of Donald Trump for the March 8, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson: The Supreme Court ruled this week that states can’t keep Donald Trump off of presidential ballots, despite his myriad crimes and active legal entanglements. But as New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall noted, the more politically consequential decision came on February 28, when the court set a hearing on Trump’s claim of presidential immunity for his role in fomenting the violent January 6, 2021, effort to overturn the election, for the week of April 22.

Edsall suggests the delay is a gift to Trump and a blow to Biden, because a failure to hold a trial means Democrats won’t be able to “expand voters’ awareness of the dangers posed by a second Trump term.” A trial, you see, would produce a lot of reporting about Trump’s role in the insurrection that could inform and presumably sway voters.

New York Times (3/6/24)

I think it’s fair to ask ourselves why journalists couldn’t do that reporting anyway, whether the “surprisingly large segment of the electorate” that Edsall says has “either no idea or slight knowledge of the charges against Trump” couldn’t just possibly learn about those things from the press corps, even without the shiny object of a trial to focus on.

Ian Millhiser reports on the Supreme Court and the Constitution, even when former presidents are not in the dock, as a senior correspondent at Vox. He’s author of, most recently, The Agenda: How a Republican Supreme Court Is Reshaping America, and also, relevantly, 2015’s Injustices: The Supreme Court’s History of Comforting the Comfortable and Afflicting the Afflicted. He joins us now by phone from Virginia. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Ian Millhiser.

Ian Millhiser: Good to be here. Thanks so much.

JJ: Your February 28 report is headlined “The Supreme Court Just Handed Trump an Astonishing Victory.” So please spell it out for us why it’s a victory, and why it’s astonishing to a longtime court watcher such as yourself.

Vox (2/28/24)

IM: I had assumed that the courts were going to try to stay neutral on Donald Trump, and neutral on the election, and so what neutrality means is, we knew from the oral argument in the ballot disqualification case that the courts weren’t going to remove Donald Trump from the ballot. We already knew that wasn’t going to happen. But I thought the flip side of it was that the Supreme Court wasn’t going to actively try to boost Trump’s candidacy by delaying his trial, by pushing it until after the election, but that’s what they did.

By scheduling this hearing in April, the trial can’t happen until after the Supreme Court resolves this immunity appeal, and so they made the decision to, the practical implication of this is, that the trial almost certainly will not happen until after the election, if it happens at all.

When the Supreme Court hands down such a consequential decision, it’s supposed to explain itself. The way the Supreme Court works is that when it does something, the majority of the justices who agree with one outcome write an opinion explaining why they did what they did, and then the justices who dissent write a dissenting opinion explaining why they disagree. And the court didn’t even have the decency here to explain why.

I mean, maybe there’s some possible justification for pushing Trump’s trial until after the election, but at the very least, they owed us an explanation for why they handed down this extraordinarily consequential decision. And the fact that they thought that they could do this without explaining themselves, I think raises very serious questions about whether the Supreme Court will be neutral on the question of whether Donald Trump or Joe Biden should win the 2024 election.

JJ: Well, I think people understand that the law does not equal justice in the way that we might understand it, but it sounds like you’re saying this is messed up on the level of law itself.

Vox (4/12/23)

IM: When you look at the long arc of US history, the law doesn’t always resemble the law. In 1870, we ratified the 15th Amendment. That’s the amendment which says the government is not allowed to discriminate on the basis of race when deciding who was allowed to vote. And that amendment was in effect for maybe five years during Reconstruction, and then it just evaporated.

For 90 years, the Supreme Court did not enforce that. We had 90 years of Jim Crow, 90 years of Black people being told they did not have their equal citizenship rights, even though it’s right there in the Constitution, saying explicitly that they’re supposed to have it. Because politically there wasn’t enough support for giving Black people the right to vote, and the Supreme Court just went with those political winds.

If you look at the history of the First Amendment, during war time, people were thrown in jail during World War II because they opposed the draft, because they gave a speech opposing the draft. For most of the late 19th and early 20th century, there was very aggressive enforcement of something called the Comstock Act—which is still on the books; this could come back at any time—which bans pretty much any kind of art or literature or anything that in any way involves sex. People were tried and convicted for selling the famous portrait The Birth of Venus. It’s a nude portrait. People were convicted of crimes because they sold reproductions of famous works of nude art, despite the fact that we have the First Amendment.

So the reason I’m describing this long history here is, I think we Americans need to have a realistic sense of what we can expect from the courts. The courts don’t always ignore the law. They don’t always follow the political winds. I can point you to plenty of examples of the Supreme Court being courageous against powerful political—I mean, the reason why Nixon had to resign is because the Supreme Court ordered him to turn over incriminating evidence.

So the Supreme Court sometimes follows the law. It sometimes does the right thing. But if you look at the long arc of American history, all I can say about the Supreme Court is “sometimes.” And apparently sometimes is not now. Sometimes is not now.

This court is not going to do anything to protect us from Donald Trump. It has made that perfectly clear. It doesn’t matter what the Constitution says. It doesn’t matter that there’s an entire provision of the 14th Amendment saying that if you are in high office, and you engage in an insurrection, you can’t hold office again—doesn’t matter. Supreme Court’s not going to enforce that provision.

And that doesn’t mean that we should all abandon hope, but it does mean we cannot rely on the courts at all. Donald Trump will be defeated at the ballot box if he’s defeated anywhere.

JJ: I’m going to bring you back to hope in just a second, but I just felt a need to intercede. My ninth grade government teacher was convinced, and not without cause, that we really weren’t going to retain very much from his class. And he had one thing, which was that every now and again he would just randomly holler out, “What’s the law of the land?” And we would yell back, “The Constitution!” That seems more painful than quaint right now.

Ian Millhiser: “When the chips are down, the Constitution is only as good as the worst five people who sit on the Supreme Court.”

IM: Yeah, we like to tell ourselves a good story about the United States. One of the purposes of public schools is to inculcate enough a certain sense of what our values should be. The nation we aspire to be is a nation where the Constitution matters. The nation that we aspire to be is one where somebody who tries to overthrow our government does not get to serve in government ever again. That is who we hope to be.

I think it is right that our public schools try to inculcate those values in us, because the way that you get Supreme Court justices who will actually share those values is by having this massive civic effort to teach us all that the Constitution matters and that we should enforce it.

But when the chips are down, the Constitution is only as good as the worst five people who sit on the Supreme Court. If those people did not internalize the lesson that you and I learned in the ninth grade, there’s nothing we can do about it.

JJ: And I’ll just bring you back: You’ve said it before, when I spoke to you last time, you said it doesn’t surprise you that this institution that’s always been controlled by elites has not been a particularly beneficent organization in American history. That’s before Clarence Thomas. That’s before the guy who likes beer. This is the history of this Supreme Court.

And so while we can and should be outraged and worried and more, what we can’t be is surprised that the Supreme Court is not swooping in now to save us from Donald Trump and whatever, heaven help us, a second Trump presidency might usher in. So let me just ask you again, finally, what is to be done? Because giving up is not an option.

IM: I think a lot about a line from President Obama’s first inaugural address, where he said, “We must choose our better history.” The United States has always had two histories. We have always, always, aspired to be a nation where we have political equality, where we can follow the rules of the road, where we have a Constitution. “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal”: Those are the words that created our nation. That has always been one of our histories.

And the other history is that we enslaved people. The other history is Jim Crow. The other history is Jim Crow–like treatment of Asian Americans out on the West Coast. The other history is Korematsu. The other history is Clarence Thomas flying around on all these billionaires’ jets.

And that has always been our history too. We have always faced a choice between, “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal,” and the other thing. And sometimes we have elections where that choice isn’t as readily apparent. This is an election where that choice is immediately apparent.

JJ: All right, then. We’ve been speaking with reporter and author Ian Millhiser. You can find his work on the Supreme Court and other issues on Vox.com. Ian Millhiser, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

IM:  Thank you.

The post ‘This Court Is Not Going to Protect Us From Donald Trump’<br></em><span style='color:#000000; font-size: 23px; font-weight: normal; line-height: 25px; font-family: 'Open Sans','sans-serif'; padding-bottom: -10px;'>CounterSpin interview with Ian Millhiser on Trump and Supreme Court appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

What is the reality behind the headlines? The reality is that the crisis in Haiti is a crisis of imperialism. Those countries calling for military intervention – the US, France, Canada – have created the conditions making military intervention appear necessary and inevitable. The same countries calling for intervention are the same countries that will benefit from intervention, not the Haitian people. And for twenty years, those countries that cast Haiti as a failed state actively worked to destroy Haiti’s government while imposing foreign colonial rule.

On Haiti, the position of the Black Alliance for Peace has been consistent and clear. We reject the sensationalist headlines in the Western media with their racist assumptions that Haiti is ungovernable, and the Haitian people cannot govern themselves. We support the efforts of the Haitian people to assert their sovereignty and reclaim their country. We denounce the ongoing imperialist onslaught on Haiti and demand the removal of Haiti’s foreign, colonial rulers.

What’s Going on in Haiti?

• The crisis in Haiti is a crisis of imperialism – but what does this mean? It means that the failure of governance in Haiti is not something internal to Haiti, but it is a result of the concerted effort on the part of the west to gut the Haitian state and destroy popular democracy in Haiti.
• Haiti is currently under occupation by the US/UN and Core Group, a self-appointed cabal of foreign entities who effectively rule this country.
• The occupation of Haiti began in 2004 with the US/France/Canada-sponsored coup d’état against Haiti’s democratically elected president. The coup d’etat was approved by the UN Security Council. It established an occupying military force (euphemistically called a “peacekeeping” mission), with the acronym MINUSTAH. Though the MINUSTAH mission officially ended in 2017, the UN office in Haiti was reconstituted as BIHUH. BINUH, along with the Core Group, continues to have a powerful role in Haitian affairs.
• Over the past four years, the Haitian masses have mobilized and protested against an illegal government, imperial meddling, the removal of fuel subsidies leading to rising costs of living, and insecurity by elite-funded armed groups. However, these protests have been snuffed out by the US-installed puppet government.
• Since 2021, attempts to control Haiti by the US have intensified. In that year, Haiti’s president, Jovenel Moïse was assassinated and Ariel Henry was installed by the US and UN Core Group as the de facto prime minister. In the wake of the assassination of Moïse and the installation of Henry, the U.S. has sought to build a coalition of foreign states willing to send military forces to occupy Haiti, and to deal with Haiti’s ostensible “gang” problem.
• The armed groups (the so-called “gangs”) mainly in the capital city of Haiti should be understood as “paramilitary” forces, as they are made up of former (and current) Haitian police and military elements.  These paramilitary forces are known to work for some of Haiti’s elite, including, some say, Ariel Henry (Haiti’s former de facto prime minister). It should also be noted that Haiti does not manufacture guns; the guns and ammunition come primarily from the US and the Dominican Republic; and the US has consistently rejected calls for an arms embargo.
• Moreover, as Haitian organizations have demonstrated, it is the UN and Core Group occupation that has enabled the “gangsterization” of the country. When we speak of “gangs,” we must recognize that the real and most powerful gangs in the country are the US, the Core Group, and the illegal UN office in Haiti – all of whom helped to create the current crisis.
• Most recently, Ariel Henry traveled to Kenya to sign an agreement with Kenya prime minister William Ruto authorizing the deployment of 1,000 Kenyan police officers as the head of a multinational military force whose ostensible purpose was to combat Haiti’s gang violence. But the US strategy for Haiti appears to have collapsed as Henry has been unable to return to Haiti and there is renewed challenge to the constitutionality of that deployment.
• The US is now scrambling for control, seeking to force Henry’s resignation while looking for a new puppet to serve as a figurehead for foreign rule of Haiti. While Haiti currently does not have a government, it has not descended into chaos or anarchy. The paramilitaries, it seems, are waiting for their orders to act, while the US strategy for Haiti is in crisis.

Why Haiti?

For BAP, the historic struggles of the Haitian people to combat slavery, colonialism, and imperialism have been crucial to the struggles of African people throughout the globe. The attacks on Black sovereignty in Haiti are replicated in the attacks on Black people throughout the Americas. Today, Haiti is  important for U.S. geopolitical and economic viability. Haiti is in a key location in the Caribbean for US military and security strategy in the region, especially in light of the coming US confrontation with China and in the context of the strategic implementation of the Global Fragilities Act. Haiti’s economic importance stems from what western corporations perceive as a vast pool of cheap labor, and its unexploited land and mineral wealth.

BAP’S Position on the Current Situation in Haiti

• BAP, as with many Haitian and other organizations, have consistently argued against a renewed foreign military intervention.
• We have persistently demanded the end of the foreign occupation of Haiti. This includes the dissolution of the Core Group, the UN office in Haiti (BINHU), and the end of the constant meddling of the US, along with its junior partners, CARICOM, and Brazil’s Lula.
• We have denounced the governments of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) (with the exception of Venezuela and Cuba), for supporting US plans for armed intervention in Haiti and the denial of Haitian sovereignty.
• We have denounced CARICOM leaders, and especially Barbados Prime Minister, Mia Mottley, for not only supporting US planned armed intervention in Haiti and offering their police and soldiers for the mission, but for also following US and Core Group dictates on the way forward in Haiti. Haiti’s solutions should come from Haitian people through broad consensus. CARICOM leaders cannot claim to be helping Haiti when they are acting as neo-colonial stooges of the US and the Core Group.
• We have denounced the role of Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva, for not only continuing Brazil’s role in the Core Group, but for also leading the charge, along with the criminal US government, for foreign armed military invasion of Haiti. We remind everyone that it was Lula’s government that led the military wing of the 2004 violent UN occupation of Haiti. Brazil’s soldiers led the mission for 13 years (until 2017).
• In solidarity with Haitian groups, we have denounced the UN approved, US-funded, Kenyan-led foreign armed invasion and occupation of Haiti. We are adamant that a U.S./UN-led armed foreign intervention in Haiti is not only illegitimate, but illegal. We support Haitian people and civil society organizations who have been consistent in their opposition to foreign armed military intervention – and who have argued that the problems of Haiti are a direct result of the persistent and long-term meddling of the United States, the United Nations, and the Core Group.
• We demand US accountability for flooding Haiti with military grade weapons. We demand that the US enforce the UN-stated arms embargo against the Haitian and U.S. elite who import guns into the country.
• We will continue to support our comrades as they fight for a free and sovereign Haiti.

Long live Haiti! 

• First published in The Black Alliance for Peace

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Black Alliance for Peace.

Despite the carnage, United Nations resolutions and international court rulings, Israel’s war in Gaza has the potential to get much worse. Unless Hamas frees all Israeli hostages by March 10, Israel may launch an all-out offensive in Rafah, a city of 1.5 million people, cornered against the border with Egypt.

The US has continued to block UN Security Council resolutions calling for an immediate ceasefire. But President Joe Biden has cautioned Israel against a Rafah ground assault without a credible plan to protect civilians.

More direct calls for restraint have come from the UN secretary-general and the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court.

• READ MORE: Israeli siege has placed Gazans at risk of starvation − prewar policies made them vulnerable in the first place
• Why Egypt refuses to open its border to Palestinians forcibly displaced from Gaza
• The UN’s top court didn’t call for a ceasefire in Gaza – how does NZ respond now?

To its credit, New Zealand, along with Australia and Canada, added its voice in a joint statement on February 15:

A military operation into Rafah would be catastrophic […] We urge the Israeli government not to go down this path […] Palestinian civilians cannot be made to pay the price of defeating Hamas.

New Zealand also reiterated its commitment to a political settlement and a two-state solution. Given how hard some other countries are pushing for a ceasefire and peace, however, it is fair to ask whether the National-led coalition government could be doing more.

NZ absent from a crucial case
So far, New Zealand’s most obvious contribution has been to deploy a six-member defence force team to the region to deter Houthi rebel attacks on commercial and naval shipping in the Red Sea.

This collaboration with 13 other countries is on the right side of international law. But the timing suggests it is more about preventing the Israel-Gaza situation from spreading and destabilising the region than about protecting international waterways per se.

Furthermore, there is a risk of New Zealand’s response appearing one-sided, considering its relative silence on other fronts.

For example, following the interim ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on the application of the Genocide Convention to Israel’s devastation of Gaza, a second opinion is being sought from the court over the legality of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory.

Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad Al-Malki told the court his people were suffering “colonialism and apartheid” under Israeli occupation. It was the latest round in a monumental debate central to any lasting peace process.

More than 50 countries presented arguments at the ICJ last week, the most to engage with any single case since the court was established in 1945. But New Zealand was not present in the oral proceedings.

This absence matches New Zealand’s abstention at the United Nations General Assembly vote that referred the case to the ICJ. A country that prides itself on an independent foreign policy seems to have lost its voice.

Doctors Without Borders warns that Gaza’s whole healthcare system is collapsing as Israel continues to intensify its attacks.

Follow our LIVE coverage: https://t.co/bo5Dp2wxPd pic.twitter.com/lyy6NQiRhX

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) February 29, 2024

An even-handed foreign policy
New Zealand does call for the observance of international humanitarian law in Gaza. It has been less vocal, though, about calling for accountability for war crimes, no matter which side commits them.

The International Criminal Court, New Zealand’s permanent representative to the UN has said, is “a central pillar in the international rules-based order and the international criminal justice system”.

Directly supporting that sentiment would mean calling for independent investigations of all alleged crimes in the current Israel-Gaza conflict.

Given countries it considers friends and allies do more to register their disapproval of the situation, New Zealand needs to consider whether its own current sanctions system is adequate.

The White House has begun to sanction individual Israeli settlers in the occupied Palestinian territories, accusing them of undermining peace, security and stability. Britain has also placed sanctions on a small number of “extremist” settlers. France has recently identified and sanctioned 28 such individuals.

Govt designates Hamas as terrorist entity https://t.co/b2EQyehohr

— Newshub Politics (@NewshubPolitics) February 29, 2024

However, New Zealand has remained silent, until this week declaring the political wing of Hamas a “terrorist” entity — a decision being criticised — and banning an unspecified number of extremist Israeli settlers from travelling to New Zealand.

This prompts an obvious question: if sanctions can be applied to both Russia and Iran for their actions, should New Zealand now follow the lead of its allies and take active measures to express its disapproval of what is happening in Gaza and the occupied territories?

Dr Alexander Gillespie is professor of Law at the University of Waikato. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Yes, the Doomsday Clock keeps ticking — it’s now at 90 seconds to midnight, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists — but the ultimate time bomb never gets the attention that it deserves. Even as the possibility of nuclear annihilation looms, this century’s many warning signs retain the status of Cassandras.

Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump withdrew the United States from vital pacts between the U.S. and Russia, the two nuclear superpowers, shutting down the Anti-Ballistic Missile, Open Skies, and Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaties. And despite promising otherwise, Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden did nothing to revive them.

Under the buzzword “modernization,” the American government, a thermonuclear colossus, spent $51 billion last year alone updating and sustaining its nuclear arsenal, gaining profligate momentum in a process that’s set to continue for decades to come. “Modernizing and maintaining current nuclear warheads and infrastructure is estimated to cost $1.7 trillion through Fiscal Year 2046,” the office of Senator Edward Markey (D-MA) pointed out, “while the Congressional Budget Office anticipates that current nuclear modernization would cost $494 billion through Fiscal Year 2028.”

Such bloated sums might prove a good argument against specific weapons systems, but Uncle Sam has incredibly deep pockets for nuclear weaponry and a vast array of other military boondoggles. In fact, compared to the costs of deploying large numbers of troops, nuclear weapons can seem almost frugal. And consider the staggering price of a single aircraft carrier that went into service in 2017, the Gerald R. Ford: $13.3 billion.

Militarism’s overall mega-thievery from humanity has long been extreme, as President Dwight D. Eisenhower made clear in a 1953 speech:

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children… This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”

The Nuclear Complex and “Crackpot Realism”

In the case of budgets for nuclear arms, the huge price tags are — in the most absolute sense imaginable — markers for a sustained, systemic, headlong rush toward omnicide, the destruction of the human species. Meanwhile, what passes for debate on Capitol Hill is routinely an exercise in green-eyeshade discourse, assessing the most cost-effective outlays to facilitate Armageddon, rather than debating the wisdom of maintaining and escalating the nuclear arms race in the first place.

Take, for instance, the recent news on cost overruns for the ballyhooed Sentinel land-based missile system, on the drawing boards to replace the existing intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) in 400 underground silos located in Colorado, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Wyoming. Northrop Grumman has already pocketed a $13.3 billion contract to begin moving the project forward. But the costs have been zooming upward so fast as to set off alarm bells in Congress, forcing a reassessment.

“The U.S. Air Force’s new intercontinental ballistic missile program is at risk of blowing past its initial $96 billion cost estimate by so much that the overruns may trigger a review on whether to terminate the project,” Bloomberg News reported in mid-December. Since then, the estimated overruns have only continued to soar. Last month, Northrop Grumman disclosed that the per-missile cost of the program had climbed by “at least 37 percent,” reaching $162 million — and, as Breaking Defense noted, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin would need to “certify the program to stave off its cancellation.”

At one level, cancellation would vindicate the approach taken by disarmament-oriented groups a couple of years ago when they tried to stop the creation of the Sentinel by arguing that it would be a “money pit missile.” But at a deeper level, the cost argument — while potentially a winner for blocking the Sentinel — is a loser when it comes to reducing the dangers of nuclear war, which ICBMs uniquely boost as the land-based part of this nation’s nuclear triad.

As Daniel Ellsberg and I wrote in the Nation in 2021, “If reducing the dangers of nuclear war is a goal, the top priority should be to remove the triad’s ground-based leg — not modernize it.” Eliminating ICBMs would be a crucial step when it comes to decreasing those dangers, because “unlike the nuclear weapons on submarines or bombers, the land-based missiles are vulnerable to attack and could present the commander in chief with a sudden use-them-or-lose-them choice.” That’s why ICBMs are on hair-trigger alert and why defeating just the Sentinel would be a truly Pyrrhic victory if the purported need for such land-based missiles is reaffirmed in the process.

In theory, blocking the Sentinel by decrying it as too expensive could be a step toward shutting down ICBMs entirely. In practice, unfortunately, the cost argument has routinely led to an insistence that the current Minuteman III ICBMs could simply be upgraded and continue to serve just as well — only reinforcing the assumption that ICBMs are needed in the first place.

The author of the pathbreaking 2022 study “The Real Cost of ICBMs,” Emma Claire Foley, is now a colleague of mine at RootsAction.org, where she coordinates the Defuse Nuclear War coalition’s new campaign to eliminate ICBMs. “News of dramatic cost overruns on the Sentinel program is unsurprising, but I don’t think that in itself should encourage disarmament advocates,” she told me recently. “Cancellation of the Sentinel program does not equal a reduction in the number of nuclear weapons, or the risk of nuclear war. It will take an organized mass movement to make good on this opportunity to meaningfully reduce the risk of nuclear war.”

The re-emerging ICBM controversy is yet another high-stakes example of the kind of gauntlet that disarmament advocates regularly face in official Washington, where presenting an analysis grounded in sanity is almost certain to be viewed as “not realistic.” On the other hand, when it comes to nuclear issues, accommodating to “crackpot realism” is a precondition for being taken seriously by the movers and shakers on Capitol Hill and in the executive branch.

Such accommodation involves adjusting to a magnitude of systemic insanity almost beyond comprehension. Disarmament advocates are often confronted with a tacit choice between seeming unserious to the nuclear priesthood and its adherents or pushing for fairly minor adjustments in what Daniel Ellsberg, in the title of his final landmark book, dubbed all too accurately The Doomsday Machine.

This country’s anti-nuclear and disarmament groups have scant presence in the mainstream media. And the more forthright they are in directly challenging the government’s nonstop nuclear recklessness — with results that could include billions of deaths from “nuclear winter” — the less media access they’re apt to get. When President Biden reneged on his 2020 campaign pledge to adopt a no-first-use policy on nuclear weapons, for instance, critical blowback in the media was meager and fleeting. Little news coverage occurred when a small number of members of Congress went out of their way to object.

“Unfortunately,” Markey said in a speech on the Senate floor two years ago, “our American democracy and Russia’s autocracy do share one major thing in common: Both our systems give the United States and Russian presidents the godlike powers known as sole authority to end life on the planet as we know it by ordering a nuclear first strike.”

Nuclear Madness and Psychic Numbing

Any nuclear first strike would likely lead to a full-scale nuclear war. And the science is clear that a “nuclear winter” would indeed follow — in Ellsberg’s words, “killing harvests worldwide and starving to death nearly everyone on earth. It probably wouldn’t cause extinction. We’re so adaptable. Maybe 1% of our current population of 7.4 billion could survive, but 98% or 99% would not.”

Such a steep plunge in planetary temperatures would exceed the worst prognoses for the effects of climate change, even if in the other direction, temperature-wise. But leaders of the climate movement rarely even mention the capacity of nuclear arsenals to destroy the planet’s climate in a different way from global warming. That omission reflects the ongoing triumph of nuclear madness and the “psychic numbing” that accompanies it.

During the more than three-quarters of a century since August 1945, when the U.S. government dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the nuclear genie has escaped from the bottle to eight other countries — Russia, France, the United Kingdom, China, Pakistan, India, Israel, and North Korea — all now brandishing their own ultimate weapons of mass destruction. And the biggest nuclear powers have continuously undermined the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.

Key dynamics have scarcely changed since, in 2006, the Centre for International Governance Innovation published a cogent analysis that concluded: “Europe and North America are busy championing nuclear weapons as the ultimate security trump card and the preeminent emblem of political gravitas, thereby building a political/security context that is increasingly hostile to non-proliferation.”

Like Barack Obama before him, Joe Biden promised some much-needed changes in nuclear policies during his successful quest to win the White House, but once in office — as with Obama’s pledges — those encouraging vows turned out to be so much smoke. The administration’s long-awaited Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), issued in October 2022, was largely the usual dose of nuclear madness. “Although Joe Biden during his presidential election campaign spoke strongly in favor of adopting no-first-use and sole-purpose policies, the NPR explicitly rejects both for now,” the Federation of American Scientists lamented. “From an arms control and risk reduction perspective, the NPR is a disappointment. Previous efforts to reduce nuclear arsenals and the role that nuclear weapons play have been subdued by renewed strategic competition abroad and opposition from defense hawks at home.”

Stymied by the Biden administration and Congress, many organizations and activists working on nuclear-weapons issues were heartened by the blockbuster movie Oppenheimer, promoted from the outset as an epic thriller about “J. Robert Oppenheimer, the enigmatic man who must risk destroying the world in order to save it.” For several months before the film’s release last July, activists prepared to use it as a springboard for wider public discussion of nuclear weapons. The film did indeed make a big splash and sparked more public discussion of nukes in the United States than had occurred in perhaps decades. The movie had notably stunning production values. Unfortunately, its human values were less impressive, especially since people on the receiving end of the scientific brilliance at Los Alamos in Hiroshima and Nagasaki (and even downwinders in New Mexico) remained off-screen.

Watching the movie, I thought of my visit to the Los Alamos National Laboratory about 60 years after the triumphant Trinity atomic test. During an interview, one of the public relations specialists there explained that the legal entity managing the Los Alamos lab was “a limited liability corporation.” That seemed to sum up our government’s brazen lack of accountability for the nuclearization of our planet.

Six months after Oppenheimer arrived at multiplexes, its political impact appears to be close to zero. The film’s disturbing aspects plowed the ground, but — in the absence of a strong disarmament movement or effective leadership among officials in Washington on nuclear weapons issues — little seeding has taken place.

At the end of January, supporters marked the first anniversary of H. Res. 77, a bill sponsored by Representative Jim McGovern of Massachusetts and cosponsored by 42 other members of the House, “embracing the goals and provisions of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.” The nonbinding measure aptly summarizes the world’s nuclear peril and offers valuable recommendations, beginning with a call for the United States to actively pursue and conclude “negotiations on a new, bilateral nuclear arms control and disarmament framework agreement with the Russian Federation” as well as purposeful talks “with China and other nuclear-armed states.”

Specific recommendations in the bill include: “renouncing the option of using nuclear weapons first; ending the President’s sole authority to launch a nuclear attack; taking the nuclear weapons of the United States off hair-trigger alert; and canceling the plan to replace the nuclear arsenal of the United States with modernized, enhanced weapons.”

The fact that only 10% of House members have even chosen to sponsor the resolution shows just how far we have to go to begin putting the brakes on a nuclear arms race that threatens to destroy — all too literally — everything.

This column was distributed by TomDispatch.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Norman Solomon.

In an essay published on January 30, William Burns, who also served as ambassador to Russia and in top State Department positions, urged U.S. lawmakers to pass a new package of weapons and equipment for Ukraine, calling it a "relatively modest investment with significant geopolitical returns for the United States and notable returns for American industry."

"Putin's war has already been a failure for Russia on many levels," Burns wrote in the journal Foreign Affairs.

"His original goal of seizing Kyiv and subjugating Ukraine proved foolish and illusory. His military has suffered immense damage. At least 315,000 Russian soldiers have been killed or wounded, two-thirds of Russia's prewar tank inventory has been destroyed, and Putin's vaunted decades-long military modernization program has been hollowed out."

"His war in Ukraine is quietly corroding his power at home," he said.

Live Briefing: Russia's Invasion Of Ukraine

RFE/RL's Live Briefing gives you all of the latest developments on Russia's full-scale invasion, Kyiv's counteroffensive, Western military aid, global reaction, and the plight of civilians. For all of RFE/RL's coverage of the war in Ukraine, click here.

Burns' remarks come as Russia's mass invasion of Ukraine nears its second anniversary, with no end in sight to the conflict.

Putin, who is expected to be resoundingly reelected in a March presidential vote, has framed the "special military operation" -- the Kremlin's euphemism for the war -- as a fundamental fight for Russia's historical identity.

The Russian economy has been put on a war footing, hundreds of thousands of people have been mobilized, and many more Russians have fled the country, either to avoid military service or out of protest of internal repression.

"One thing I have learned is that it is always a mistake to underestimate his [Putin's] fixation on controlling Ukraine and its choices," Burns wrote.

"Without that control, he believes it is impossible for Russia to be a great power or for him to be a great Russian leader. That tragic and brutish fixation has already brought shame to Russia and exposed its weaknesses, from its one-dimensional economy to its inflated military prowess to its corrupt political system."

Ukraine, meanwhile, has struggled to hold its battlefield positions after a failed counteroffensive last year. Western and Ukrainian officials had had high hopes for the effort, in part due to NATO training and powerful new Western weaponry.

Both Russia and Ukraine are now dug in to established positions across the 1,200-kilometer front line as winter blankets the country. Some experts fear that Russia will retrench and replenish its forces, and be in a position to launch its own offensive as early as this summer.

Domestically, Ukraine's leadership is facing growing impatience with the status of the war.

News reports this week said that President Volodymyr Zelenskiy is considering pushing out the country's top military officer, General Valeriy Zaluzhniy, a popular figure seen as a possible political rival to Zelenskiy.

"This year is likely to be a tough one on the battlefield in Ukraine, a test of staying power whose consequences will go well beyond the country's heroic struggle to sustain its freedom and independence," Burns said.

Putin "continues to bet that time is on his side, that he can grind down Ukraine and wear down its Western supporters," he added.

Western aid to Ukraine has buoyed its fight against Russia, but enthusiasm for that has waned in Washington and other Western capitals.

In the United States -- the biggest single supplier of arms and equipment to Ukraine -- Republican lawmakers have balked at authorizing President Joe Biden's new $61 billion aid package, insisting it should be tied to a broader reform of U.S. immigration laws.

Burns argued that the U.S. funds were being well-spent by Ukraine, which is wearing down Russia.

"The key to success lies in preserving Western aid for Ukraine," he wrote.

"At less than 5 percent of the U.S. defense budget, it is a relatively modest investment with significant geopolitical returns for the United States and notable returns for American industry," Burns wrote.

"Keeping the arms...offers a chance to ensure a long-term win for Ukraine and a strategic loss for Russia; Ukraine could safeguard its sovereignty and rebuild, while Russia would be left to deal with the enduring costs of Putin’s folly," he added.

The Kremlin had not responded to Burns' essay as of January 31.

This content originally appeared on News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

On a Sunday morning in Charlevoix, a small town surrounded by lakes in northern Michigan, people gathered in the Greensky Hill Indian United Methodist Church. The small, one-room log building is almost 200 years old and the hymns are sung in English and Anishinaabemowin.

It was December, so Pastor Johnathan Mays was leading an Advent service, one of his last, since he would soon retire. In between reflections on scripture, Mays touched on an important venture: The church is planning to install solar panels on their larger meeting hall, working with Michigan-based nonprofit Solar Faithful to do so.

Greensky Hill has a long history of environmental care and stewardship, grounded in Anishinaabe culture, with a majority Native congregation.

One of the ministry’s priorities is the “greening of Greensky Hill.”

Mays said that prompts them to ask “how we can use our space and our resources to address those issues for climate care, or creation care, or what some people call Earthkeeping?”

As Greensky Hill works to become more sustainable, it’s switching from propane to heat pumps to become more energy efficient. Mays said solar will allow them to use renewable energy and give that energy back to the grid. 

“The biggest issue was how can we get this huge building off of greenhouse gas creation?” he said, referring to the meeting hall, which was built in the 1990s. 

Across the country, houses of worship are pursuing solar systems.

As of 2021, about 2 percent of houses of worship in the United States have solar systems, according to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which the University of California manages for the U.S. Department of Energy. That’s disproportionately high; houses of worship make up only 0.6 percent of all non-residential buildings.

But these projects can be difficult to execute. Congregations can have tight budgets, older buildings and more pressing priorities. And switching energy systems can mean a lot of bureaucratic paperwork for which they might not have the staff. 

And, because houses of worship generally don’t pay taxes, they’ve also had trouble capitalizing on renewable energy tax benefits.

One alternative has been for them to work with third parties that could benefit from the tax credits. For instance, an investor could buy and install solar panels on a church. The church would buy that power from the investor, but wouldn’t own the panels — an arrangement called a power purchase agreement.

Now, they have another option. The federal Inflation Reduction Act has made it possible for governments and tax-exempt entities, including houses of worship, to get tax credits for renewable projects. Called direct pay, the program provides them with a tax credit worth up to 30 percent of the installation cost. That can help cover some expenses, and advocates say it’s critical to getting more congregations to consider solar.

“I expect in the coming year, it’s really going to boom, the solar on houses of worship,” said Sarah Paulos, the programs director for Interfaith Power and Light. “It makes a lot of sense. If they can cut their utility bill way back, then they have more money to do what they’re there for, which is their mission.”

Interfaith Power and Light might sound like a local utility (or maybe a prayer group) but it’s actually a national network focused on climate action and religion, started in 1998 as a coalition of Episcopal churches that worked together to buy renewable energy. It has since expanded to other denominations and faiths.

Paulos has worked in this field for almost 20 years. She said when she started, there were a lot of climate deniers, especially in churches.

“In the beginning, people of faith were really, really being courageous and stepping out and talking about responding to climate change through renewable energy and energy efficiency as a moral call to care for creation,” she said.

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While there’s increasing acceptance that climate change is happening, religious Americans are still far from unified in their views.

A 2022 Pew Research Center survey found that most religious adults believed they should protect the Earth. But for a variety of reasons, highly religious people tend to be less concerned about climate change than other adults in the U.S. 

One way to reach people and engage them in climate action is through tangible efforts like solar, said Leah Wiste, the executive director of Michigan Interfaith Power and Light.

“In the public conversation, I think we’ve kind of failed to see the leadership that people of faith and conscience are taking on these issues,” she said.

Local involvement is critical to getting more people to install solar and non-residential buildings – such as schools or houses of worship – are part of that.

A study published last November in the journal Frontiers in Sustainable Energy Policy found that when non-residential buildings install solar, they can spur other installations in the area.

But raising awareness of solar doesn’t necessarily make it more equitable. 

The researchers say it’s unclear how effective houses of worship can be in encouraging more solar in their communities “without directly addressing low-income barriers to solar adoption,” like budget constraints and lower home ownership rates.

And houses of worship with solar are located disproportionately in “relatively wealthy, white and educated census tracts,” according to Berkeley Lab, mirroring the broader trend. 

Still, many people working at the intersection of religion and renewables say these projects are an opportunity for more people in those communities to learn about solar.

“Part of that can happen just through the simple physical act of putting a system on the roof,” said Galen Barbose, a scientist at Berkeley Lab. “But houses of worship are also in a unique position to be able to sponsor events, talk to their membership, and potentially really serve as emissaries for solar energy.” 

Rob Rafson has worked to put solar panels on churches for years. He’s the president of the solar energy company Chart House Energy. 

About a year ago, Chart House Energy teamed up with the Climate Witness Project, Michigan Interfaith Power and Light, and climate activists in the Detroit area to launch Solar Faithful. 

Rafson wanted to make it easier for houses of worship to adopt solar.

“It’s been a very big challenge,” Rafson said. “Because churches — they’re nonprofits, they don’t have a budget, they don’t want to borrow money, and the size project… is too small for investors to invest in.”

Despite such challenges, congregations have managed to install panels. At the First Lutheran Church in Muskegon, a new solar array shines on the roof.

“They’re hard to see,” said Pastor Bill Uetricht. He’s walking around the church, craning his neck, trying to get a good view of the panels. “You can see that it’s on about half of that roof up there.”

Now that it has solar panels, the church needs to buy less power from utilities. That’s expected to lower the energy bill.

It’s an example of a power purchase agreement. By purchasing the solar-powered energy, First Lutheran will pay off the project cost of around $175,000 to an investor. Buying the power from their own array, they’re slowly paying back their investor. Once that’s done, the power that comes from the array is essentially free.

Uetricht said First Lutheran got involved with solar when a couple in the congregation gave the church two panels they didn’t know what to do with.

“I contacted a cousin of mine who works in alternative energy, and I said, ‘Hey, send me to someplace where I can do something with these two panels,’” Uetricht said.

They ended up working with Solar Faithful. 

Uetricht said installing solar panels is one way of fulfilling their mission. He said that the world doesn’t belong to us, but that it is a gift – one that we haven’t been caring for.

“Old technologies have contributed to that lack of care,” he said. “So it only makes sense that we would be at the forefront of encouraging alternative energy sources.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Across the country, houses of worship are going solar on Jan 31, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Izzy Ross.

More than 140 insurance industry plaintiffs have joined the cascade of lawsuits filed against utilities and landowners related to the Maui wildfires, a move that could set up a battle over resources available to pay victims of the disaster that killed 100 people and destroyed much of Lahaina in August.

The global insurance industry has swept into Honolulu state court, seeking to collect reimbursements for claims paid to policyholders. Those total more than $1 billion in West Maui for residential property alone, according to the latest data from the Insurance Division of the Hawaiʻi Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs.

The plaintiffs include names familiar to Hawaiʻi homeowners: insurers like State Farm Fire and Casualty Co., USAA Casualty Insurance Co., Island Insurance and Tradewind Insurance. 

Also included are scores of additional companies, such as the French and Australian branches of the giant Swiss Re, Japan’s Mitsui Sumimoto Insurance, and Lloyd’s, the London-based marketplace known for insuring everything from ship cargo, fine art and space satellites to Bruce Springsteen’s voice. 

Defendants include Hawaiian Electric, Hawaiian Telcom, Kamehameha Schools and other unnamed parties the insurers allege were negligent in allowing the fires to start and spread. 

It’s a predictable turn of events, says Robert Anderson, director of the Center for Risk Management Research at the University of California, Berkeley. 

When a company like State Farm issues a policy to a homeowner, Anderson said in an email, State Farm typically buys reinsurance from another company like Swiss Re to cover the risk from catastrophic events, such as a hurricane hitting an urban area “or a wildfire that spreads and takes out a large number of homes, as happened in Lahaina.”

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When such a catastrophe occurs, State Farm would typically pay claims to the insured property owners and get reimbursed by its reinsurers, Anderson said.

If the losses occurred because of negligence, the insurer and reinsurers can sue the negligent parties to recover the payments “in the same way that a health insurance company could seek to recover the costs of treating someone injured in an automobile accident,” he said.

Multiply that by thousands of claims, and it explains the enormous number of insurance company plaintiffs, spread out over 26 states and a half dozen countries, filing suit in Hawaiʻi. It’s also a sign that the global insurance market is functioning adequately to spread the risk of a major catastrophe in Hawaiʻi, said Sumner LaCroix, an economist with the University of Hawaiʻi Economic Research Organization.

“The last thing we want in Hawaiʻi is to find out that two or three companies bear the risk of having a hurricane hit Hawaiʻi,” LaCroix said.

Battle could ensue between victims and insurers

The suit could have major implications in the long run for plaintiffs seeking to recover claims for damages from Hawaiian Electric and the others, said Mark Davis, a Honolulu trial lawyer who is serving as a liaison for dozens of plaintiffs lawyers who have filed suits on behalf of victims in Maui court.

At this point, Davis said, the insurance companies and other plaintiffs have a common goal: to prove that the utilities or landowners or both acted negligently in allowing the fires to start and spread. The insurance industry has had its own teams of investigators, Davis said.

“For the most part their inquiries go hand in hand with the plaintiffs’ inquiries,” he said.

Indeed, the insurance industry’s factual allegations of what happened on Aug. 8 mirror the allegations in many of the negligence suits filed by residents.

But eventually, Davis said, Lahaina residents will find themselves competing with the insurance companies for the same pot of money. 

To the extent that the insurers have paid claims, they’ll likely try to assert priority over the homeowners, which happened after lawsuits related to California wildfires drove Pacific Gas & Electric Co. into bankruptcy in 2019, Davis said.

Still some states have adopted a legal principle known as the “made whole doctrine,” which means insurers can’t jump the line ahead of insured property owners until the insured property owners’ damages are completely covered. Otherwise, a property owner could collect from both their insurance company and the wrongdoer if negligence is proven. All of this sets the stage for a fight between the individual plaintiffs and the insurers if they can prove the utilities or landowners were negligent.

“Inevitably, that is a big struggle later on as they start to dole out resources,” Davis said. 

Hawaiian Electric and Hawaiian Telcom declined to comment. Paul Alston, an attorney for Kamehameha Schools trustees also declined to comment. Lawyers for the insurance companies did not return calls.

Hawaiian Electric, meanwhile, does not have the resources to reimburse the property insurers for the massive claims paid out so far, if the insurers were to prevail in their suit. The company’s stock price has plummeted since the fires. Rating agencies have slashed Hawaiian Electric’s bond rating, meaning it will cost more for the company to borrow money. And Hawaiian Electric has largely tapped out its lines of credit to raise cash.

The company is pursuing federal grant funds, which it hopes to steer to rebuilding infrastructure, but that money can’t be used to pay damages. Meanwhile, a big chunk of proceeds from a woefully inadequate insurance policy, worth $165 million, that could be used to reimburse the insurers has already been pledged to a settlement fund for people killed and injured in the fires.

The company has promised $75 million to the so-called Maui Recovery Fund. Makana McClellan, a spokesman for Gov. Josh Green, said the fund expects to have $175 million total when it becomes operational on March 1. Green previously announced the state, Kamehameha Schools and Maui County also would provide funding. McClellan said more details would be available this week. 

Each victim could receive more than $1 million from the fund if they choose to drop their legal claims, Green has said. 

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But the fund is not meant to address property damage. And how much money will be available to cover such claims isn’t clear. After putting $75 million in the recovery fund, the company theoretically would have $90 million. But Hawaiian Electric has been bleeding cash on lawyers.

When the company held its quarterly earnings call for the period ended Sept. 30, Hawaiian Electric revealed it had spent $27.6 million on fire-related expenses to that point, including $10.8 million – or about $1.5 million a week – on legal fees. And that was as the lawsuits had just begun pouring in. It remains to be seen how much Hawaiian Electric’s lawyers have cannibalized the company’s liability insurance at this point, 24 weeks after the fire.

Meanwhile, the staggering amount of insurance losses is becoming clear. According to the Hawaiʻi Insurance Division, as of Nov. 30, insurers reported 3,947 claims for residential property in West Maui, including 1,689 total losses. Estimated losses totaled $1.54 billion, of which insurers had paid $1.09 billion.

Perhaps the only good news in all of this, Davis said, is that insurance companies don’t appear to be squabbling about paying claims, which he said isn’t surprising given that so many homes were completely burned. 

“There’s not a lot to talk about if you bought ‘x’ amount of insurance and your house is dust,” he said. 

Civil Beat’s coverage of Maui County is supported in part by grants from the Nuestro Futuro Foundation.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Insurance companies are going after Hawaiian Electric to reimburse Lahaina fire claims on Jan 27, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Stewart Yerton, Honolulu Civil Beat.

Despite reassuring claims of modest economic recovery from the ruling Chinese Communist Party leadership in Beijing, the struggling economy has left employers and governments unable to pay wages, or forced companies to shut down facilities and lay off staff.

All of that comes at a time when China's hundreds of millions of migrant workers might normally be hoping to earn some extra cash ahead of the Lunar New Year festivities in February.

"There are so many people out of work," one unemployed worker in his twenties who gave only the nickname Marginalized Mainlander said in a recent interview with RFA.

"This only started happening this past year," said the man, who has moved from city to city looking for construction work, and is now camped out in the workplace dormitory of an employed friend.

"A while back, it used to be so easy to find construction work," he said, adding that he had tried driving for a ride-hailing service in Shanghai, but gave up after he did the math.

"I was driving 12-hour shifts, and only making 280 yuan [US$39]," Marginalized said, adding that he and other drivers would sleep in their car for days on end to save on time and expenses. "I needed to make more than 300 just to break even."

After a few days, he quit the app, losing all of his deposit in the process.

"There were a lot of other people in the same boat," he said.

Marginalized said he would give it another couple of weeks, then head back to his hometown in rural Guangdong province if nothing turned up.

He's not the only one struggling.

June figures from China's National Bureau of Statistics showed a more than 21% unemployment rate among the country's 18-24 year-olds, a statistic that has since withdrawn for review, according to officials.

In July, Peking University scholar Zhang Dandan published a study showing that if all the young people who have moved back into their parental home to "lie flat" were counted, the March figure would be closer to 46.5%.

Meanwhile, new housing construction figures have taken a nosedive, falling by 21.2% from January through November, implying far fewer jobs for migrant workers to chase.

Manufacturing sector layoffs

It's a similar story in manufacturing.

Twentysomething Zhang Wei was laid off from his job at an electronics factory in June, and has been unemployed ever since.

The factory, based in the central city of Wuhan, had once made parts for Samsung mobile phones, but the orders were drying up, and only three out of its four production lines were operational at the time he was let go, said Zhang, who also asked to be identified by a pseudonym.

Zhang, who has a college degree, used to carry out quality inspections of smartphone screens, a skilled job.

"The problem is that the new workers coming in are cheaper," he said. "The electronics factory leadership were inhumane."

"They talk about high wages when they recruit you, but once you're in, it's different," Zhang said, in a reference to the labor agencies that typically recruit migrant factory workers. "They can fire you just like that."

"There are too many people unemployed, and you can't get a job just for the asking," he said, adding that this year has been the worst he has known, with agencies undercutting his requested salary by up to 20%.

He said the 4,000 yuan, or US$560, he was recently offered just isn't enough to make work, which he likened to prison labor, worthwhile.

"Who would want to go to prison for 4,000 yuan a month?" Zhang said. "Your hands never stop, you have to sit upright, and they report everything you do -- what's that if not a prison?"

Even more privileged white-collar workers are feeling the pinch this winter.

A state-sector computer systems analyst who gave only the nickname Pikachu for fear of reprisals said he has applied for jobs as wide-ranging as community grid worker, hospital IT specialist, and even student counselor at a university since quitting his job due to family circumstances.

"I went to apply for a community grid worker job a couple of days ago," he said. "They were looking to recruit 15 people, and when I went to take the exam, more than 1,000 applicants showed up."

Pikachu has been actively sending out resumes, but says he rarely hears back from anyone. He is also considering taking the civil service exams, but that route into a safe official job is now also massively oversubscribed.

"Five times oversubscribed," he said. "A lot of people sign up to try their luck, even if they don't meet the recruitment criteria."

And there is likely no way back to his former job, either.

"I heard that at least half of the employees will be laid off," he said, citing rumors from former colleagues.

As young men, Zhang, Pikachu and Marginalized aren't even among the most marginalized in the Chinese labor market. Women and people over 35 are likely to struggle even more than they do with job-hunting in the current climate.

Bosses clear out

China's former factory and company bosses, meanwhile, are shutting up shop, with many leaving the country in the wake of the zero-COVID restrictions, citing a deteriorated political situation under Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping.

Ren Xiaoyao has spent the last five years in a controlled shutdown of his three real estate companies, laying off more than 200 employees in the process, many of whom have since struggled to find work.

"They're pretty skilled, but only a few found jobs, and even those found they could only get one-third of their original salary," Ren, who gave a pseudonym for fear of reprisals,  told RFA from his new home in North America.

He said he left China "because Xi Jinping wanted to be an emperor," in a reference to Xi's abolition of presidential term limits and ongoing moves to concentrate executive power in his own hands in recent years.

"When he put [the abolition of term limits] on the agenda, I decided to shut down all of my China businesses," Ren said.

Fellow entrepreneur Cai Shenkun said his company is suffering from Xi's moves to enlarge and enrich the state sector at the expense of private companies, which once accounted for around 80% of jobs in the Chinese economy, according to official figures.

"State-owned enterprises lead the bidding for major projects, so companies like ours are gradually being shut out of the industry," said Cai, who runs a smart-lock identification tech company and is a prominent blogger and current affairs commentator.

"State-owned companies have basically taken a dominant position."

Cai has been planning to shutter his company for three years, but has hesitated because his employees have nowhere else to go.

"I am encouraging them to find other jobs, but they haven't yet, and they are still there," he said. "I keep telling them they can leave any time because there's no more business."

Eventually, Cai expects the firm to go under next year, like many others in the sector.

"Some of my friends' companies used to be very big, but now they've basically stopped or reduced production," he said. "They don't think they'll survive — it's a very common phenomenon."

Going out of business

While official figures pointing to economic damage are hard to find, due to the government's insistence on positive news about the economy, the financial website Titanium Media recently reported that some 90% of companies in the chip industry had gone out of business during the course of 2023.

Thousands of rural tourism businesses have also gone out of business, according to a report in The Paper, while industrial profits fell by 7.8% and the average number of employees in listed companies fell by 12% between 2018 and 2022, according to government figures.

While Cai and Ren have no plans to go back to China, Marginalized, Zhang Wei and Pikachu have little choice but to try to weather the economic gloom.

"If I have no money, people will look down on me," said Zhang, who dare not go home yet. "I don't know how I'm going to survive this winter."

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Roseanne Gerin.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Wang Yun for RFA Mandarin.

Grayling. Photo: George Wuerthner.

In 1991, I, with the help of Jasper Carlton at the Biodiversity Legal Foundation, petitioned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) to list the Arctic Grayling (sometimes called Montana Grayling) under the Endangered Species Act.

My petition was prompted by the concerns of several Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks Department (MDFWP) fish biologists. The biologists were concerned that MDFWP wasn’t showing much concern about the decline of grayling in the Big Hole River because they did not want to antagonize the livestock industry. I will get into the reason for this concern in a bit.

By the 1980s, I had a reputation as an outspoken livestock grazing activist, and the biologists needed someone to work outside of their agency to help save the fish. So they contacted me about the grayling’s plight and sent me the latest population trends and other materials to put together my listing petition. In other words, without the assistance of these dedicated biologists, I would not have had the science to petition for listing.

I am also indebted to Jasper Carlton, who had worked on listing woodland caribou in northern Idaho. Jasper, though not a lawyer, had studied the legal requirements for listing.

We pulled together a listing petition. And in 1994, the FWS determined that the Montana grayling was approaching extinction. Still, as was standard then, they said other species were in greater danger of extinction, so we received a “warranted but precluded” decision.

In other words, the grayling was gone from 95 percent of its original distribution, and the population trends were downward; without invention, the grayling would likely go extinct. But the FWS had other species whose future was even less certain.

It is now 33 years later, and I am still waiting for the grayling to be listed. The story of the grayling is an example of how agencies and specific industries like the livestock industry work to delay, delay, and delay federal protection for the fish. My cynical view is that the agencies supposed to protect the fish hope they will go extinct. End of story. End of having to deal with a controversial species.

ECOLOGY OF GRAYLING

Grayling in Montana is a relic of the Ice Age. They are related to trout and salmon and, like these other fish, require cold, clear water.

Historically, grayling were native to flowing rivers in the Arctic Ocean, including the Missouri River. However, when Pleistocene glaciers moved south into northern Montana, they blocked the northward flow of the river.

Big Hole River near Wisdom, Montana. Photo George Wuerthner.

One of the ecological strategies of the grayling is migration. In the Big Hole River, grayling migrate as much as 50 miles between wintering sites in deep holes to spawning habitat in tributary streams.

HOW LIVESTOCK IMPACT GRAYLING

Livestock production has several significant impacts on grayling survival. Irrigation withdrawals by ranchers for hay production in summer significantly limit flows in the Big Hole to the point where I have seen the river reduced to a trickle in some years.

Low flow on the Big Hole River due to irrigation withdrawals. Photo George Wuerthner. 

Low water leads to higher water temperatures that can be lethal to grayling. Also grayling are concentrated in the remaining pools where they must compete with other fish for food, holding water, and hiding cover.

Manure from livestock leads to water pollution with greater algal growth and reduced dissolved oxygen.

STALLING TACTICS

Though the FWS repeatedly has determined that grayling is declining and may face extinction, MDFWP and the livestock industry have used delaying tactics. In 2006, the Fish and Wildlife Service approved a Candidate Conservation Agreement with Assurances (CCAA). The CCAA allows ranchers who work on grayling habitat improvements are protected against any future ESA requirements.

CCAA designation means that even if future research demonstrates that a new strategy could save grayling from extinction, participating ranchers won’t have to make additional changes in ranching practices.

Of course, it has taken years to determine whether CCAA contributes to grayling survival, and in 2014, the FWS denied listing based on CCAA implementation.

In 2020, environmental groups appealed that decision and won. However, once again, the FWS determined that the listing of the Arctic grayling was unwarranted.

Meanwhile, grayling numbers in the Big Hole River continue to decline, almost to functional extinction.

The latest lawsuit filed in January asserts that since the early 1990s when I petitioned for grayling listing, the Big Hole grayling population has declined by 50% or more. Big Hole grayling’s estimated 2022 adult spawning population is between 496 and 671.

As drought and climate warming continue, the sure way to give graylings a chance to survive into the next century is to provide them with more water in summer and to reduce the livestock destruction of riparian habitat, which maintains shade that cools water and provides grayling hiding cover from predators.

CONCLUSION

The FWS is fiddling while Rome burns. This delay is partly due to the influence of Montana’s Congressional delegation, which has pressured the agency to find any reason to deny listing. In addition, MDFWP, who are supposed to manage species like grayling for public benefit under the Public Trust Doctrine, is leery of listing because they do not want to antagonize the ranching community they depend upon for access to private lands for hunters and anglers. It’s important to note that all the fishery biologists I have had contact with are grayling advocates, but they do not control the decisions of MDFWP directors.

The post Why the Grayling is Going Extinct appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by George Wuerthner.

Independent reporter Talia Jane posted the following on Twitter/X:

The action was in protest against corporate wealth alongside increased food insecurity & to call attention to Amazon’s contracts with Israel.

She also posted a video of the event with people throwing around flyers and shouting, “Feed the people, eat the rich!” Jane stated the food was later redistributed and given to food ‘distros’ and community care spaces feeding migrants and the unhoused.

It’s Going Down — which describes itself as “a digital community center for anarchist, anti-fascist, autonomous anti-capitalist and anti-colonial movements across so-called North America” — has published on its website the texts of the flyers.

Here is an abridged version of one of the texts:

We assert that corporations like Amazon and Whole Foods do a tremendous amount of harm: hoarding wealth and resources, stealing labor, and destroying the land we live on. When we purchase food from Whole Foods, only a small fraction of what we spend is going back to those doing the labor to produce the food — the vast majority of it is funneled into Jeff Bezos’s coffers, where it is in turn reinvested in weapon manufacturing, war, and big oil.

Furthermore, Amazon’s contract for Project Nimbus with the IOF [Israel Occupation Forces] means that Bezos profits directly from the ongoing genocide in Palestine. Boycott. Divest. Shoplift. Not another dime for genocide!

We believe direct action is a vital form of resistance against the capitalist institutions built to crush, starve, and bleed us to death. Solidarity with shoplifters everywhere! We hope you will be inspired to take similar action wherever you are.

Move like water. Take back what has always been yours. Become ungovernable.

Some of the unscrupulous practices and the adverse impacts of Bezos and his Amazon corporation are described in the online article ‘Amazon, ‘Economic Terrorism’ and the Destruction of Livelihoods’. Indeed, US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in 2019 that Amazon had “destroyed the retail industry across the United States.”

Project Nimbus, referred to in the flyer, is a $1.2bn contract to provide cloud services for the Israeli military and government and it will allow for further surveillance of and unlawful data collection on Palestinians while facilitating expansion of Israel’s illegal settlements on Palestinian land.

Direct action

Of course, there will be those who condemn the direct action described above. And they will do so while remaining blissfully unaware of or silent on the direct action of the super-wealthy that has plunged hundreds of millions into hardship and poverty.

The wholly unavoidable conflict in Ukraine (which profits corporate vultures), speculative food commodity trading, the impact of closing down the global economy via the COVID event and the inflationary impacts of pumping trillions of dollars into the financial system have driven people into poverty and denied them access to sufficient food.

All such events did not result from an ‘act of God’. They were orchestrated and brought about by deliberate policy decisions. And the effects have been devastating.

In 2022, it was estimated that a quarter of a billion people across the world would be pushed into absolute  poverty in that year alone.

In the UK, poverty is increasing in two-thirds of communities, food banks are now a necessary part of life for millions of people and living standards are plummeting. The poorest families are enduring a ‘frightening’ collapse in living standards, resulting in life-changing and life-limiting poverty. Absolute poverty is set to be at 18.3 per cent by 2023-2024.

In the US, around 30 million low-income people are on the edge of a “hunger cliff” as a portion of their federal food assistance is taken away. In 2021, it was estimated that one in eight children were going hungry in the US.

Small businesses are filing for bankruptcy in the US at a record rate. Private bankruptcy filings in 2023 have exceeded the highest point recorded during the early stages of COVID by a considerable amount. The four-week moving average for private filings in late February 2023 was 73% higher than in June 2020.

As hundreds of millions suffer, a relative handful of multi-billionaires have gained at their expense.

A February 2023 report by Greenpeace International showed that 20 food corporations delivered $53.5 billion to shareholders in the financial years 2020 and 2021. At the same time, the UN estimated that $51.5 billion would be enough to provide food, shelter and lifesaving support for the world’s 230 million most vulnerable people.

These ‘hunger profiteers’ exploited crises to gain grotesque profits. They plunged millions into hunger while tightening their grip on the global food system.

Meanwhile, nearly 100 of the biggest US publicly traded companies recorded 2021 profit margins that were at least 50 per cent higher than their 2019 levels.

In a July 2021 report, Yahoo Finance noted that the richest 0.01% — around 18,000 US families — hold 10% of the country’s wealth today. In 1913, the top 0.01% held 9% of US wealth and just 2% in the late 1970s.

The wealth of the world’s billionaires increased by $3.9tn between 18 March and 31 December 2020. Their total wealth then stood at $11.95tn, a 50% increase in just 9.5 months. Between April and July 2020, during the initial lockdowns, the wealth held by these billionaires grew from $8 trillion to more than $10 trillion.

The world’s 10 richest billionaires collectively saw their wealth increase by $540bn over this period. In September 2020, Jeff Bezos could have paid all 876,000 Amazon employees a $105,000 bonus and still be as wealthy as he was before COVID.

And do not forget the offshoring of plundered wealth by the super-rich of $50 trillion into hidden accounts.

These are the ‘direct actions’ we should really be concerned about.

A point rammed home via another flyer that was issued during the protest in New York:

The shelves in this store have been stocked with items that were harvested, prepared, and cooked via a long supply chain of exploitation and extraction from people and land.

This food was made by the People and it should fill the bellies of the People.

Don’t fall prey to the myth of scarcity! Look around you: there is enough for all of us. This food is being hoarded, and we are giving it back to our communities. The world belongs to us – everything is already ours.

We deserve to eat whether we can pay or not. Tear down the system that starves and kills people, one liberated apple at a time!

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Colin Todhunter.

That’s according to award-winning director and producer Joseph McGinty Nichols (McG), who’s been talking to UN News’s Pauline Batista about the evolution of AI in film.

He says from Scorsese to Taylor Swift, AI will usher in a new era of “hyper personalized entertainment” – for better or worse.

This content originally appeared on UN News - Global perspective Human stories and was authored by Pauline Batista.

That’s according to award-winning director and producer Joseph McGinty Nichols (McG), who’s been talking to UN News’s Pauline Batista about the evolution of AI in film.

He says from Scorsese to Taylor Swift, AI will usher in a new era of “hyper personalized entertainment” – for better or worse.

This content originally appeared on UN News - Global perspective Human stories and was authored by Pauline Batista.

The U.S. government may be complicit under international law in Israel’s unfolding genocide of the Palestinian people, a group of legal scholars warned the Biden administration and the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court.

Lawyers at the Center for Constitutional Rights issued the dire warning to President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin in a 44-page emergency brief on Wednesday, on the heels of Biden’s trip to the Middle East. There, Biden reiterated his administration’s unwavering support for Israel — even as the Israeli government wages an unprecedented bombing campaign on the occupied Gaza Strip in retaliation for a horrific attack by Hamas that killed more than 1,400 Israeli citizens.

“Israel’s mass bombings and denial of food, water, and electricity are calculated to destroy the Palestinian population in Gaza,” Katherine Gallagher, senior attorney with CCR and a legal representative for victims in the pending ICC investigation in Palestine, told The Intercept. “U.S. officials can be held responsible for their failure to prevent Israel’s unfolding genocide, as well as for their complicity, by encouraging it and materially supporting it.”

“We recognize that we make serious charges in this document — but they are not unfounded,” she added. “There is a credible basis for these claims.”

A State Department spokesperson declined to comment, saying, “As a general matter, we don’t offer public evaluations of reports or briefs by outside groups.” The White House and Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment. On Wednesday, the U.S. vetoed a United Nations Security Council resolution that condemned all violence against civilians and urged humanitarian aid to Palestinians in Gaza. The U.S. opposed the resolution because it did not reference Israel’s right to defend itself.

Israel has invoked that right in its assault on Gaza, which has already killed more than 4,200 Palestinians and displaced more than 1 million. But collective punishment — including measures like Israel’s blockade on fuel, food, and electricity into the occupied territory — and the indiscriminate targeting of civilians constitute war crimes under international law. A number of legal experts have argued the actions may also amount to crimes against humanity and genocide, as defined under the 1948 Genocide Convention. On Thursday, a panel of U.N. experts issued a separate statement that condemned the bombings of schools and hospitals in Gaza as crimes against humanity and warned that there is a risk the crimes might escalate to genocide.

“We are sounding the alarm: There is an ongoing campaign by Israel resulting in crimes against humanity in Gaza,” the experts wrote. “Considering statements made by Israeli political leaders and their allies, accompanied by military action in Gaza and escalation of arrests and killing in the West Bank, there is also a risk of genocide against the [Palestinian] people.”

While warnings about a potential genocide have grown more numerous in recent days, some international law experts cautioned that the war crimes and crimes against humanity — including the crime of apartheid — of which Israel has long been accused are no less serious. As one international law scholar put it: “[T]here is no hierarchy of international crimes.” The problem is that Israel has not been held accountable for any of its past crimes, making accountability for its ongoing offensive unlikely.

Under international law, the crime of genocide implicates not only those carrying out the crime, but also those complicit in it, including by “aiding and abetting.”

“Rather than continuing to enable Israeli crimes, the U.S. should pressure Israel to stop its military operations and secure a ceasefire.”

According to the CCR brief, Israel is attempting to commit, if not already committing, the crime of genocide, specifically against the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip. The U.S. government is failing to uphold its obligation to prevent a genocide from happening, the brief adds. Additionally, there is a “plausible and credible case” to be made that ongoing and unconditional U.S. military, diplomatic, and political support for Israel’s military intervention against the people of Gaza may make it complicit in the genocide under international law. (The U.S. has its own version of the law, making it a crime for any U.S. citizen — including the president — to commit, attempt, or incite genocide.)

“Rather than continuing to enable Israeli crimes, the U.S. should pressure Israel to stop its military operations and secure a ceasefire, and to ensure the provision of urgently needed humanitarian assistance and basic necessities for life to Palestinians in Gaza,” Gallagher said.

The CCR briefing also calls on the government to address the root causes behind the recent violence, including Israel’s 16-year siege on Gaza, its 56-year-long illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories, “and the apartheid regime across all of historic Palestine.”

Palestinians carry usable items from the heavily damaged Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital building in Gaza City, Gaza, on Oct. 18, 2023.

Unconditional Support

As Israel continues to plan for a ground invasion of Gaza, the U.S. sent it a shipment of armored vehicles on Thursday, following shipments of U.S-made advanced weaponry earlier this month. Biden is expected to argue for greater military support for Israel in a Thursday night address.

Israel has historically been the largest recipient of U.S. military assistance — to the tune of $158 billion since the country’s establishment in 1948. That funding has increasingly come under scrutiny in the U.S., including following Israeli forces’ killings of several U.S. citizens. On Wednesday, a senior State Department official resigned from his post, citing the U.S. government’s ongoing provision of lethal arms to Israel.

“I cannot work in support of a set of major policy decisions, including rushing more arms to one side of the conflict, that I believe to be shortsighted, destructive, unjust, and contradictory to the very values that we publicly espouse,” Josh Paul, the former director of congressional and public affairs for the State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, wrote in a letter. “If we want a world shaped by what we perceive to be our values, it is only by conditioning strategic imperatives by moral ones, by holding our partners, and above all by holding ourselves, to those values, that we will see it.”

Asked about the resignation on Thursday, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said, “We have made very clear that we strongly support Israel’s right to defend itself, we’re going to continue providing the security assistance that they need to defend themselves.”

This week, legal experts also testified before the United Nations Human Rights Committee, specifically calling on members of the international body to urgently address the unfolding crimes and particularly hold the U.S. accountable for its role in them.

“If such a body fails in this particular genocidal moment to reassert its commitment to the right to life our collective humanity will be profoundly diminished,” Ahmad Abuznaid, a human rights lawyer and director of the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, told the committee.

He also warned against the rippling effects of U.S. support for Israel and dehumanization of Palestinians, referring to the killing of a 6-year-old in Chicago last week. “As U.S. politicians and mainstream media beat the war drums for genocide, repeating dehumanizing rhetoric and misinformation about our people, that has not only emboldened Israel’s genocidal acts but also had alarming consequences in the U.S.”

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Alice Speri.

The way I see myself is that I’m not really a singer or lyricist. There’s been times when I’ve tried to force lyrics and sing, and I’ve just given up and been like, “Oh, I don’t think this is for me.” But then, equally, I’ve had an idea for a guest vocalist, and I end up caught up with some lyrics and stuff myself, and I end up singing it myself.

I always say to people, I know I can’t sing, and that’s something I’m not bothered about. I just like doing it and scribbling five words down and repeating those five words. That works for me. I feel like there’s a seriousness that comes in with labeling myself as a vocalist, and I’m just not.

When you have other vocalists on your tracks, how often are these collaborations entirely digital or in person? Are they sometimes a mix of both?

Reflection was all digital. It was the pandemic. For You and I was all digital as well. This new one, Gentle Confrontation, I’ve done a couple of tracks in the studio with George Riley and Contour. That’s been really nice, to do it in person.

I guess because I’m nervous and shy, and I get a bit stressed, I could be really quiet, so I feel like I’d be quite dead to work with in a studio setting, as opposed to not having that in-person conversation [aspect in digital collaboration]. But equally, it’s been nice to come out of my comfort zone and just make stuff. For example, the Contour collaboration, I had made an idea on my own. I sent it to him, and it wasn’t quite working 100% when he came to London, so we made something from scratch in a studio setting, and it was very different and was much better.

How do you overcome the challenges of feeling nervous or shy when you’re collaborating in person?

It’s a lot I put on myself. I feel like if I’m in a room for a long time with someone I haven’t really met before and don’t really know that well, even if you like each other’s stuff on Instagram or whatever, it’s obviously different. You might not click in person.

For me, studio spaces don’t feel the most comfortable. I’m really used to working at home in comfort, my own space, and studios just feel sterile to me. I feel like I put a time limit on my head [in studios with others], and I have to be really quick, especially if someone’s writing vocals. I just feel like I can’t take my time, even though I can and it’s okay, but I just put this pressure that I need to make something quick, because obviously they need to write something too. It’s something I’m still navigating.

With someone like George, we actually met in the studio two and a half years ago, but that’s one of the rare occasions where we hit it off instantly. They’re genuinely my friend in my life, not just [in] this whole music thing.

Have you felt that there are any distinct advantages or disadvantages to collaborating in person versus digitally?

The disadvantage of digital is, sometimes, the other person will feel like there’s less leeway to do stuff, but every time I send something to someone, I never give a brief. I just say, “Do whatever you feel like doing.” I don’t like to make it rigid because I always find it’s more freeing and better when collaboration comes without any limitation. Digitally, sometimes, there isn’t necessarily that meeting of two minds, which you would get more if you were actually in a room with them. But then, something digital, I like because it removes the awkwardness for me.

You’ve released an EP or album every year from 2018 onward. Why do you release music so often? Does this reflect how quickly or how often you create music, or is it about keeping people listening, or is it some of both?

It’s really not about people listening. I don’t make music a lot. I do make it kind of quick. I love the serious stuff of the albums, but then, I like doing the random fun stuff, like the Bandcamp thing, and just playing around with a capellas or just being like, “Oh, I feel like making an EP today, let me just do five songs.”

Even when I work on an album, I don’t spend too much time going over it, and I do more than a Bandcamp thing, but I don’t like everything to be so clean and so perfect, so that’s probably why there’s a quickness.

What draws you toward things that aren’t clean and perfect?

I first heard of Bandcamp in 2011-12. I was about 15, 16, and I was listening to a lot of math rock then, and a lot of the artists definitely weren’t signed back then, like Foxing and a bunch of other guys, and their stuff sounded so bad, but I loved that. They were recording in the garage, and when they all got signed the cleanness just felt a bit less emotional. But obviously that doesn’t mean bad. I just have a thing for the roughness of that stuff I was listening to, there was a warmth to it.

Another musician I spoke with recently said something along the lines of, sometimes, when you make a song cleaner or more perfect, it loses some of its meaning or the emotional impact you intended for it to have. Does that sound true to you?

100%, yeah, especially if I’m doing my bad singing. I like to keep the first take, or first few takes, even if it sounds a bit pitchy. I don’t use pitch correction. How my voice sounds is how my voice sounds unless I’m purposely trying to use AutoTune in a creative way, a Travis Scott way or something, instead of a medical surgery kind of thing. I just don’t like that, personally.

For [Gentle Confrontation], I did a couple more takes. “2003,” I did more takes because the importance of that song, I wanted to nail it a bit more, so I knew I could sing it better, and it just wasn’t hitting. Even sometimes when I play the drums and the keyboard and I hit a wrong note or two, I’ll just keep it in there.

How do you know when an album or an EP is done? What about a song?

Most EPs I’ve done have just been for fun, Bandcamp stuff, so I just stop when…I guess with EPs, it’s easier. It’s like, “Oh, EPs are usually four or five songs.” I know it will end within that bracket.

In an album, it could vary. When I’m coming to an end is when I’m making new ideas and they sound really bad. For each album, I always make 30 to 35 ideas. They could range from literally a five-second loop to a two-, three-, four-minute actual song, and I mark them. There’s always ones I know immediately—the first song, “Gentle Confrontation,” was one I actually did during making Reflection, so it’s in my Reflection album folder, but I knew it didn’t fit there, so I marked it and said to myself, “I’m going to use it for whatever I felt.”

[Gentle Confrontation] was obviously longer than all the others, and I was trying not to think about, everyone always goes for 10 songs, that’s how every album has to be—10, 11 songs. I was trying to tell myself that it doesn’t matter. I was worrying a bit about, it’s more or less an hour, is that too long? I always just know I’ve made enough.

It sounds less like the length was an intentional decision and more like that’s what made sense based on the ideas you came up with. Does that sound right?

Yeah. I don’t have a plan of how long something is going to be, and when I was going through what songs I liked, and it was going past 12 [songs], and it was going past 14. I had 15, but then I really wanted Marina Herlop on it, so I’m going to make it 16.

I wanted a lot of things on it, and I didn’t want to leave [them] out, because, for me, a lot of the time, if I make something in the album cycle and I really like it, I probably won’t use it for something else. I wanted to do everything on this one. I had a bunch of people in my mind that I really wanted to be on it, and so, if we’re making that 11-track to a 12-track, 12-track to 14, etc., then that’s how it was going to be for me.

You’ve mostly released music under your own name, but you’ve also released an album as Whatever the Weather. Why has a second alias felt necessary for your creativity, whether just due to genre differences or something more?

It kind of came randomly. I wasn’t planning on making an alias. I was approached by Ghostly [International] about doing a record, and I just didn’t see Loraine James under it. I’d made some stuff that I really, really liked but just could never fit under my name, so it was like, “Okay, well, let’s start something else.”

It was nice to dedicate time and put a different energy into it. I really enjoyed making that album, and I even more enjoyed playing it live. I’ve only done it a handful of times, like five times, but it’s such a different pace for me. I sit down on a chair just taking my time and it feels much slower, but I feel a lot lighter, in a weird way. It’s really nice to put out a different energy and not be in the club space all the time either.

This makes me wonder what value live performance has in your creative process.

[On Gentle Confrontation], “Tired of Me” came from playing versions of it live for quite a few years, and “Try for Me” with Eden Samara, I reworked that after playing it live a couple of times because I thought it sounded pretty flat. It’s weird with that song, because I actually prefer the live version, but I would never change it in terms of production because the live version would never translate as a recorded song and vice versa, so I like having the difference of that.

I really like taking the songs and playing them live because it’s a different version of them and it definitely made me tweak some things on Gentle Confrontation. On “Try for Me,” there’s this bass bit that came from a live performance I did last year. I got the audio back from it and there was a crowd going “woo!” as well, and I used that. It was nice to fuse it together in a not 100% obvious way, so that was fun. Production and playing live play massive parts of Loraine James. They don’t exist without the other.

Over the six or so years that you’ve been releasing music, have you had any sort of day job along the way? If so, how have you balanced that day job with your music? If not, how did you know how to make the leap from having a day job to not having one and just focusing on your music?

My first album, 2017, I did that when I was at uni. We had to do a final music project, and I didn’t know what to do, so I made an album. And when you get a music degree, you can’t really do anything with a music degree, so I was doing hospitality work for a couple of years. I would only play at the one-odd show every, I don’t know, six months or something, all in London. And then, I was working at a school, and that was when I got signed to Hyperdub.

I wasn’t really playing much then either. Then, when For You and I came out, I did a few shows. I supported Holly Herndon on one, and Telefon Tel Aviv, which was really cool. To get to a show in Brighton, I finished work at four, and I had to take the train and then work the next day. And for international shows, you come back on a Sunday and you wake up at six to work. It was a lot.

Before the pandemic hit, I was getting stressed because I had a few dates, and I was really quite tired because of playing on the weekend and waking up early to go out to work. It did start to drain me. But even before the pandemic hit, I was planning on just taking a leap and seeing about doing this music thing full-time, seeing if it would work. And then, the pandemic hit, so I wasn’t working. I survived off doing remixes, and Bandcamp Fridays. I did a bunch of Bandcamp EPs.

I still never feel settled, because I feel like, at any second no one, maybe, wants to see you play or listen to your thing. I know it can happen in a second, so I’m never comfortable, which isn’t great—but I guess freelance, everyone would feel like that.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Max Freedman.

Chris Townsend is a 44-year trade union worker and organizer. He is the retired Political Action Director for the United Electrical Workers Union and was the International Union organizing and field director for the Amalgamated Transit Union.

The workplace in the United States is a dictatorship. And if you're willing to challenge that dictatorship— create a rebellion against it—you might be able to build a union. If you look at the statistics, the number of elections— the number of those campaigns that actually get that far, which is only a small number, most of them are incinerated, liquidated, poison gassed, fired, terminated out of existence before you ever get that election— but if you get that election, the labor movement is winning.

Chris Townsend

When you have a labor leadership that is lazy, unimaginative, unimaginative, rarely challenged, has a very timid view, a very limited worldview, and they see their role more as administrator as opposed to leaders— this is the modern situation that we face. We don't have much of a leadership, sadly. We have an administrator group, and they have administered the decline.

Chris Townsend

Let's be very, very realistic here. I don't think there can be a labor union movement in the United States under present federal laws. There are just too many hurdles, too many delays, too many licenses for these corporations to bust up the situation… And I'm amazed that you can listen to what the AFL puts out, what labor union leaders put out—they almost never mention card checks, they never mention repealing Taft -Hartley. They don't force the Democrats— who get elected in no small part because of union support— to put these labor law reforms in place.

Ralph Nader

In Case You Haven’t Heard with Francesco DeSantis1. October 1st marked the first day of Fiscal Year 2024 in Washington DC, and with it, DC’s Cashless Ban finally goes into effect, per Axios. Now, district residents will be able to report businesses that do not accept cash and/or those who post signage saying they will not accept cash. If any listeners out there are based in Washington and wish to report any such businesses, feel free to submit them to me at francesco.desantis@csrl.org. And remember, if you see something, say something.

2. Democracy Now! reports that Federal Communications Commission Chair Jessica Rosenworcel has gone on record saying she plans to restore Net Neutrality rules – which would “bar internet providers from blocking access or throttling customers’ connections based on how much they pay or which websites they visit” – which were repealed under the Trump administration. This follows Democrats finally taking majority control of the commission. Common Cause remarked, “To allow a handful of monopoly-aspiring gate-keepers to control access to the internet is a direct threat to our democracy.”

3. Brazilian President Lula has issued a statement in support of the United Auto Workers strike. Lula, who himself worked as a union organizer at the Brazilian automobile manufacturing facilities of auto giants like Ford, Volkwagon, and Toyota, made this statement after meeting with President Biden and seeing him take to the picketline in support of the striking workers. Lula added “It is crucial that presidents all around the world show concern for labor." More about Lula’s history with automobile labor unions is available at the Multinational Monitor.

4. Despite concerns raised by high-ranking Democrats in Congress, the Biden administration has approved Israel’s entry into the visa waiver program, meaning Israelis can now visit the US for up to 90 days without a visa, and Americans can do the same. However, the Middle East Eye reports that Arab-American Nondiscrimination Committee plans to challenge this decision in court, as Israel may not meet the legal criteria for the program due to their discrimination against Palestinian Americans. Huwaida Arraf, a lawyer representing the ADC, added “This is all so unnecessary, all the US government had to do was maintain the standard it has with every other country in the Visa Waiver Programme. This lawsuit could have been avoided, but the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department resurrected the debunked notion that separate is somehow equal. As these plaintiffs show, that notion is a farce.”

5. The Sacramento Bee reports California Governor Gavin Newsom has vetoed two major pro-labor bills that emerged late in this session of the state legislature. One would have granted unemployment insurance to striking workers, a push which emerged in the face of the extended entertainment industry strikes. The other would have brought domestic workers under “the umbrella of OSHA protections.” These vetoes were handed down along with Newsom’s decision to appoint LaPhonza Butler, head of EMILY’s List and a Maryland resident, to fill the Senate seat left vacant by Dianne Feinstein’s passing.

6. On October 1st, The State Department issued a statement decrying “Anti-Democratic Actions in Guatemala,” directed at President-elect Bernardo Arevalo and his Semilla Party. The statement expresses that “The United States is gravely concerned with continued efforts to undermine Guatemala’s peaceful transition of power…Most recently, the Guatemalan Public Ministry seiz[ing] electoral materials under the custody of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal,” and goes on to add that “The United States…[is] actively taking steps to impose visa restrictions on individuals who continue to undermine Guatemala’s democracy, including current and former members of Congress, judicial actors, and any others engaging in such behavior…The Guatemalan people have spoken. Their voice must be respected.”

7. PBS reports that during a recent meeting between American officials and Mexican President AMLO, the latter levied scathing criticisms of US foreign policy, including the mammoth aid packages for Ukraine and economic sanctions on Cuba, Venezuela, and other Latin American nations. President López Obrador said the United States “should spend some of the money sent to Ukraine on economic development in Latin America…[and]…called for a U.S. program “to remove blockades and stop harassing independent and free countries, an integrated plan for cooperation so the Venezuelans, Cubans, Nicaraguans and Ecuadorans, Guatemalans and Hondurans wouldn’t be forced to emigrate.”

8. The Japan Times reports that “The Japanese government plans to seek a court order to disband the Unification Church…after a monthslong probe into the religious group over allegations of soliciting financially ruinous donations from members and other questionable practices.” The report goes on to say “Scrutiny of the group intensified after former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was fatally shot during an election campaign speech last year over his perceived links to the entity, an incident which also brought to light its connections with many ruling Liberal Democratic Party lawmakers.”

9. Finally, Disney World is being hit with a substantial tort lawsuit. A woman visiting the park for her 30th birthday suffered “serious ‘gynecologic injuries’” while on the “Humunga Kowabunga” ride. I will spare listeners the grisly details, but suffice it to say she experienced “severe and permanent bodily injury,” which required surgery, per Law & Crime. Yet, in typical fashion of corporate media reportage on tortious injury, this story is being presented primarily as nothing more than a “wedgie,” just as the McDonald’s lawsuit was reported as merely being about hot coffee. A deep dive into that case is available at the Tort Museum website. 

This content originally appeared on Ralph Nader Radio Hour and was authored by Ralph Nader.

Governor Katie Hobbs responded to those calls for action on Monday when she canceled one of Fondomonte’s four leases in the state’s rural Butler Valley and pledged not to renew the other leases when they expire next year. Hobbs, a Democrat who took office earlier this year, said in a statement about the decision that the company “was operating in clear default” of its lease and had violated state laws around hazardous waste. She also pledged to “hold defaulting, high-volume water users accountable” and “protect Arizona’s water so we can sustainably grow for generations to come.”

That will require Hobbs to tackle a problem that is larger than just one company. Agriculture accounts for around three-quarters of Arizona’s water use, and alfalfa is one of the most water-intensive crops in the West. The state may have managed to fend off one egregious company, but fixing the region’s overall water deficit will involve much harder political and economic choices.

“I think the governor was looking for a reason to cancel these leases,” said Kathleen Ferris, a senior research fellow at Arizona State University’s Kyl Center for Water Policy and an architect of the state’s landmark 1980 groundwater law. “But the bigger problem is unregulated use of groundwater in rural areas of the state. That’s the big elephant in the room — we are just not addressing this use of groundwater, and it’s finite.”

Fondomonte’s aggressive water use in Butler Valley has drawn attention to Arizona’s lax groundwater regulations and the high water demand of crops like alfalfa. The state has set limits on groundwater pumping around population centers like Phoenix and Tucson, but companies in rural areas can still pump as much as they want with no restrictions, even if that means sucking water away from neighboring homes and businesses. 

To make matters worse, the Saudi-owned company operates on a section of state-owned land in a valley northwest of Phoenix, and it pays just $76,000 per year to lease that land from the state. In most parts of Arizona, it’s illegal to move water from one basin to another, but state lawmakers had marked the Butler Valley in the 1980s as one of two places that might someday send water to thirsty Phoenix. (Saudi Arabia outlawed the production of alfalfa and other crops in 2018 amid a severe water shortage in the country.)

Fondomonte has said it will appeal Hobbs’ decision, but even if Arizona succeeds in forcing out the company, the state will still have a big alfalfa problem. The hay plant is one of the most water-intensive crops in the United States, requiring about five acre-feet of water per acre each year. An acre-foot of water is equivalent to 326,000 gallons, or enough water to supply two average homes for about a year. Fondomonte told the state government in a letter in February that it grows about 7,000 acres of alfalfa in Arizona.

Producing the crop was a big business in Arizona before the Saudis arrived around a decade ago, in large part because the state’s warm climate allows farmers to achieve much bigger yields than they do in other parts of the country. The state produced more than 2 million tons of alfalfa in 2021, or about 8.2 tons for every acre planted. That’s much more than the national average of 3.2 tons per acre. Fondomonte’s production accounted for a small part of that: In its February letter, a company official said the firm produced only 70,000 tons of the crop every year, or 2.5 percent of the state’s overall output.

Tackling the larger water footprint will be far more difficult. Fondomonte was operating on state land that it had acquired at cut-rate prices, but most of the state’s alfalfa production takes place on private land. That’s the case in Cochise County, on the state’s southeast edge, where rural residents have lost out on well water since corporate giant Riverview Dairy started growing alfalfa in the area. Other foreign nations have also gotten in on the business: A United Arab Emirates-based company called Al Dahra grows and exports alfalfa in La Paz County, with support from the state’s own pension fund. Fondomonte itself has other operations on private land in Vicksburg, near Butler Valley.

“We have a church that’s just up the road from them in Vicksburg, and they haven’t had water for three years,” said Holly Irwin, a member of the La Paz County Board of Supervisors who has fought Fondomonte. She praised Hobbs for canceling the lease, but worried that the state could lease the same acreage to another company that might take over the farm.

“Moving forwards, they’re going to have to evaluate how things are done, and maybe restrict the amount of water that comes out of each well,” she said.

Foreign corporations aren’t the only ones responsible for Arizona’s groundwater shortage, though. The state exported around 22 percent of its alfalfa crop last year, up from almost none in 2011, but the vast majority of its crop still goes to feed dairy cows within the state or in other parts of the West. Moreover, most of the state’s largest groundwater pumpers, such as Riverview and Peacock Nuts, a massive nut farm operation in the western part of the state, are owned and based in the U.S. Without action from lawmakers, Hobbs can’t do anything about this overdraft on private land, even though these companies may be taking just as much water as Fondomonte.

“Our concern is that one of the things that the governor mentioned in her press release was the idea that the water use was one of the determining factors in canceling those leases,” said Philip Bashaw, the CEO of the Arizona Farm Bureau, which advocates for the state’s farmers. “We are concerned about the precedent this might set for other agricultural leases on state land.” The state leases about 150,000 acres of its trust lands for agriculture, or 1.6 percent of its total acreage.

In a statement to Grist, Fondomonte said the company hadn’t broken the terms of its state lease and vowed to appeal Hobbs’s decision. A spokesperson said the company “remains committed to progressive, efficient agricultural practices on all operations.” 

In some cases, locals have fought back against thirsty corporations, but progress has been difficult. Residents of Cochise County voted last year to impose new water restrictions in one overtapped groundwater basin, but the basin’s largest dairy and nut farms would be grandfathered in under the new rules, and they won’t have to slow down their pumping. Another referendum in a nearby basin failed after organizations backed by Riverview mounted a lobbying campaign to oppose it.

Read Next

The Cochise County Groundwater Wars

Jake Bittle

There aren’t any other takers right now for the water in Butler Valley, but alfalfa’s water demand presents an acute problem in the state’s population center of Maricopa County, which in 2017 produced around 30 percent more alfalfa than La Paz County, where Fondomonte operates, according to USDA statistics. Farms in the Phoenix area have been draining groundwater for decades to grow alfalfa and other crops, and until the turn of the 21st century they used more water than the county’s 4 million residents did. That’s despite the fact that Phoenix has far stricter groundwater regulations than rural areas like Butler Valley. 

It’s not only Arizona that has embraced the crop. California, Oregon, Idaho, Colorado, and Utah all boast alfalfa farms that stretch across thousands of acres, and the crop has guzzled up plenty of water in these states, too. According to one estimate, alfalfa and other silage crops account for as much as 55 percent of water usage in the Colorado River basin, and more than half the water usage in Utah, the nation’s second-driest state. 

The reason for this is simple: Alfalfa is a lucrative business. The hay product fetched about $320 per ton in 2022, up from $210 the year before, making it more lucrative than other large-scale crops like wheat. It provides nutritious and healthy feed for cattle and dairy cows, which means there’s significant demand for it both in the United States and overseas in places like Saudi Arabia.

“The vast majority of the alfalfa that’s grown in Arizona is grown to support our local agriculture industry, which is there to support the urban areas,” said Bashaw, adding that the hay feeds cows that produce goods like milk, cheese, and beef, and that more than 70 percent of those goods are sold within the state. “Alfalfa is a really critical part of being able to source dairy products locally for a large metropolitan area.”

For as long as companies can harvest ample water from underground aquifers, or from the Colorado River, they’re likely to keep growing it wherever they can, and water sources across the region will keep dwindling.

“The longer this goes on, the bigger the problem,” Ferris told Grist, “because the more land that gets put into cultivation, the harder it is to do anything to control the depletion. As long as farmers have the ability to pump water, they grow what they think is the most valuable crop.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Arizona is evicting a Saudi alfalfa farm, but the thirsty crop isn’t going anywhere on Oct 6, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Jake Bittle.

The post Keep Us Going! appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Becky Grant.

The spotlight

On Friday, April 21 — the day before Earth Day — students, teachers, city staff, sustainability advocates, and others gathered at Holabird Academy, an elementary and middle school in southeast Baltimore. The crowd was there to celebrate the announcement of a new initiative for the city: a pilot of 25 electric school buses, which will officially kick off later this school year.

Holabird was chosen for the occasion because it, too, is a relatively recent sustainability win for Baltimore — it’s one of two net-zero, LEED Platinum schools that opened in the city in 2020, nearly a decade in the making.

In the courtyard, blue plastic chairs were assembled facing a podium, which quickly filled up as people gathered to hear remarks from city leaders. And a large yellow bus sat parked on the hill above the school courtyard — familiar-looking, but with a twist: It was missing an exhaust pipe. The demo bus was provided for the day to give community members the chance to experience an electrified ride.

Students on Holabird Academy’s Green Team address the crowd at the event on April 21. Claire Elise Thompson / Grist

“This is a really big deal for Baltimore city,” Lynette Washington, then the chief operating officer for Baltimore City Schools, told the crowd at Holabird. “While there have been other school districts that have been doing electric buses, we haven’t had the opportunity to do it, because of access to resources. For us to have this access, and be able to participate in this type of initiative, it’s a big deal for Baltimore city.”

Transportation contributes more to greenhouse gas emissions than any other sector, and the nation’s 480,000 school buses make up its single largest public transportation fleet — a fleet that millions of children rely on to get to school safely (and far more efficiently than if every student were to drive on their own). But 90 percent of buses run on diesel fuel, and spew out diesel exhaust, which, in addition to being bad for the environment, is a known carcinogen.

Even in urban Baltimore, where most students are able to either walk or take public transit to school, about 305 yellow buses hit the streets every school day, each one averaging about an 80-mile route — and they primarily serve students with special needs.

Switching over to electric fleets has become a goal for many cities and school districts. As of June, there were 2,277 electric buses either on the streets or on order for school districts in the U.S., according to the World Resources Institute. And more than double that number are committed, meaning that school districts plan to continue electrifying their fleets.

Federal funding from the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law has been crucial to this trend, largely because one of the biggest barriers to electrifying school bus fleets is the price tag. “The cost of an electric bus is about three times the cost of a diesel bus,” says Robbin Marshall, assistant director of student transportation for Baltimore City Public Schools.

Last fall, Baltimore received $9.4 million from the EPA’s Clean School Bus Program. It was one of nearly 400 school districts from across the country selected to receive funding for new buses, with a focus on underserved areas and those overburdened by pollution, in keeping with President Biden’s Justice40 goals.

For Baltimore, going electric wouldn’t have been possible without the help of the EPA grant. Although Maryland’s Climate Solutions Now Act of 2022 includes school bus electrification as a goal for the state, it wasn’t a practical consideration for Baltimore before the funding became available. “As soon as the opportunity came for us to get funding for it, it became a goal,” says Marshall.

But as Baltimore began consulting with other school districts before taking the leap to electrify its school bus fleet, even more challenges emerged. Among the school districts that had purchased electric buses, Marshall says, “Almost unanimously, the districts who did it on their own had some type of costly issue that prevented them [either] from getting the buses right away, or cost them more money for an issue that came up after the fact.”

Neighboring Montgomery County has the largest electric school bus project in the country, and it offers a different model for the switch to electric buses. Though the Washington, D.C., suburb is among the wealthiest counties in the nation, it still chose not to dive right into purchasing its own buses. Instead, the county partnered with a company called Highland Electric Fleets, which works with municipal partners to help manage the process of adopting this new technology.

Highland first helps school districts secure funding — by applying to the EPA grants, for instance — then buys the buses from EV manufacturers. And, working with cities over 10- to 15-year contracts, the company essentially provides electrification as a service, from the hardware of the buses themselves to the software that optimizes charging schedules. It is also responsible for all repairs and maintenance, although the company offers training so that cities can keep their existing staff and contracts. “I would call it a fully de-risked journey into electrification,” says Ben Schutzman, Highland’s chief operating officer.

Montgomery County has set its sights on a fully electric fleet within 10 years. For its initial pilot, the county has committed to swapping 326 of its buses to electric by 2025, and 86 are already running.

Montgomery was only Highland’s second customer when it launched its pilot in 2021, Schutzman says — the company’s first customer was Beverly, Massachusetts, with a single bus. “I think they got the second electric vehicle off of the production line,” Schutzman laughs. Highland has since grown rapidly, now working with over 30 customers in school districts large and small, which Schutzman believes mirrors the acceleration of EVs more broadly.

Baltimore is preparing to launch its own pilot, following its neighbor’s model and partnering with Highland. A depot with 25 charging stations was constructed this summer, with Highland’s help. Five of the buses (smaller Type A school buses) are due to be delivered this month, and 20 more (the classic Type C buses) will be coming in November. Highland will offer trainings for the drivers on best practices for things like maximizing energy efficiency, and then the buses can hit the road.

Marshall thinks the city may someday transition to owning the buses itself, both as EVs become less expensive and as the technology becomes more familiar. But working toward a fully electric fleet will depend on additional resources, he says, and also on how the buses perform. For instance, he has questions about range, and whether the batteries will be able to accommodate additional trips that buses sometimes need to make for field trips or athletic competitions.

“I think community benefits will be more of a long-term thing,” adds Marshall. “Because, you know, we’re talking about less emission fumes in the air. Mind you, 25 buses out of the hundreds of buses that are operating within the district’s contract is just kind of a small drop in the bucket.” City officials estimate that the 25 new buses will avoid over 6,000 gallons of diesel and 145 tons of CO2 per year.

Students on the Green Team and school district officials pose in front of an electric bus. Claire Elise Thompson / Grist

But there are also some immediate benefits that Marshall and others are keen to see when the buses hit their routes later this year. Back at Holabird, one of those benefits became clear when the crowd had the opportunity to ride around the block on the demo electric bus. As people boarded, somebody remarked that the bus was already on — a surprise, given how utterly quiet it was.

“Diesel buses are so loud,” Marshall says. “Kids almost have to scream at each other because they have to compete with the volume of the engine.” In addition to the reduction in air pollution, some advocates believe the reduced noise pollution is beneficial to children’s mental and physical well-being as they journey to and from school.

One student, Alexa, a fifth grader at Holabird last spring and a leader on the school’s Green Team, shared with the crowd why she was proud of the city’s initiative. “I think it’s really cool that our school system will be getting electric buses,” she said. “In my sustainability class, we have learned about the harmful effects of air pollution, and I am so excited to know that our city is trying to decrease its carbon footprint.”

— Claire Elise Thompson

More exposure

• Read: more about the EPA’s clean school bus grant program (Grist)
• Read: more about the growth of school bus electrification, with helpful graphics (Canary Media)
• Watch: a short video exploring the benefits and challenges of electric school buses (CNBC)
• Read: why buses are “among the most overlooked solutions for decarbonizing the U.S.” (Scientific American)
• Read: how rickshaws, a ubiquitous form of transportation across many Asian countries, are rapidly electrifying (The Atlantic)

A parting shot

Not to be outdone, European cities have pioneered another clean mode of school transportation: bike buses. They can range from huge convoys of children on various two-wheeled vehicles, guided by parent volunteers and local police, to specialized vehicles like the “S’Cool Bus,” pictured below in northwestern France. It’s a big tandem e-bike, crewed by about nine children and an adult “driver.”

IMAGE CREDITS

Vision: Grist

Spotlight: Claire Elise Thompson / Grist

Parting shot: Charly Triballeau / Stringer via Getty Images

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline In Baltimore, yellow buses are going green on Oct 4, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Claire Elise Thompson.

The wheels of justice grind on, the awful guy keeps babbling. In New York, Trump spewed rage, hate, lies on the first day of a fraud trial that, thanks to a "mind-blowing" screw-up by his lawyers, will be decided solely by the judge he's been savaging for days. Awkward. But given the current, erratic state of his mind - he beat Obama, Jeb Bush went to war in Iraq, windmills are killing whales, he'll dampen California homes, everything he's done was "perfect" - he may not have noticed.

Last week, Trump's shoddy little empire got the "corporate death penalty" when Justice Arthur Engoron granted New York and fiery D.A Letitia James partial summary judgment on whether Trump, his two evil spawn and his company were legally liable for years of fraud. Yup, the court ruled, finding he'd grossly, persistently inflated the value of his crappy assets on financial statements to get loans and make deals - tripling, say, the size of his gold-plated penthouse and upping the value of $18-to-$27 million Mar-a-Lago to as much as $612 to $739 million, a leap of over 2,300%. That way, Michael Cohen has testified, he could get better loans, nobody would call them, and he'd snag a dumbly-and-devoutly-to-be-wished higher spot on the Forbes list of rich guys; Trump, said another flunky, "liked to see it go up." In a nice little flourish, Engoron also unceremoniously stripped the Trump Organization of all their business licenses, and Trump of his gaudy, tinpot tycoon persona, ruling assets will be put in receivership and sold at bargain-basement prices. Somewhat like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, thus did he likely free grateful New Yorkers from their long, crass Trumpy curse and the pod people who came with it.

Unlike his earlier indictments, a pissed-off Trump showed up in court to sit scowling at the defense table; he told reporters he was there to "watch this witch-hunt myself"; but likely also to avoid being deposed in Florida after suing Michael Cohen. Above all, he wanted a venue to sound off beyond hisceaselessTruth Socialstream of frantic rants at anyone daring to call him to account: A "corrupt and racist AG" and "horror show" who's "preventing police from doing their job (as) people are being murdered all over the sidewalks of New York," a "ROGUE, OUT OF CONTROL, TRUMP HATING JUDGE" whose "anger & hatred (is) unprecedented by those who've watched." At the courtroom before media and flash bulbs, he got still more bellicose, slamming Engoron as a "Democrat operative" and "a disgrace to people who call themselves judges." "This guy's getting away with murder," he railed. "This is a judge that should be disbarred... should be out of office...some people say should be criminally charged." (More pot/kettle!) Also, with frisky accordion hands, "Election interference," the "greatest witch hunt of all time, "a sham and scam," his "financial statements are phenomenal," "everything was perfect," "there was no crime - the crime is against me."

Despite his rancor, the trial opened with a placid "Good morning" from a smiling Justice Engoron, who during almost three years of presiding over James' lawsuit had already ruled repeatedly against Trump - made him sit for a deposition, held him in contempt, fined him $110,000 for his malarkey - before razing his crooked little real estate empire. A profile of Engoron, 74, reveals a smart quirky New York liberal who's taught music, played in a bar band, presided over hundreds of cases ranging from free speech issues to dog custody fights, and peppers his rulings with song lyrics and movie quotes. In this trial, scheduled to run until late December, he's tasked with deciding on monetary damages for Trump's abuses; James' lawsuit seeks $250 million. Opening statements on both sides were shorter than expected. The state argued he long, knowingly overvalued his properties to "obtain benefits he was not entitled to," raking in over $1 billion: "This is not business as usual...and these are not victimless crimes." The defense said he made billions "by being right" about his "Mona Lisa properties," the banks made over $100 million, and it didn’t really matter what he said on his financial statements because they had a disclaimer: "That is not fraud," said Alina Habba. "That is real estate."

The bombshell of the day - after Trump endlessly whining an "unfair" judge "RAILROADED this FAKE CASE through (his) Court at a speed never seen before...denying me everything. No Trial, No Jury" - was that it was his inept lawyers who put his fate in the hands of a possibly inhospitable judge, not a jury of his (maybe in New York equally hostile) peers, by failing to check a box in routine paperwork, or as Engoron calmly put it, "Nobody asked for a jury trial." The fact this isn't their first blunder - they've missed deadlines, repeatedly re-filed and been sanctioned for the same stupid motions, made basic legal errors (Engoron had to chide Habba, "Opening statements are not testimony" - suggests they're not sending their best. Still, astounded legal experts slammed the not-checking-the-box fiasco as "mind-blowing" and "very ominous for him." By lunch break, it wasn't clear Trump understood where the blame lay, but he was pretty busy: His "face like thunder," he creepily glared at and loomed over James, like Hillary at the debate, on his way out, and then did a repeat, aggrieved performance before the press, fomenting violence against James - "You ought to go after this attorney general" - and raving again about a "ridiculous" judge "that (sic) already made up his mind."

The "mind" of the purportedly leading GOP candidate for president, meanwhile, is increasingly a matter of debate. Even as the mainstream press gratingly maintain a "Biden Gaffe Watch" with inane stories like An 80-Year-Old President’s Whirlwind Trip - and Trump risibly boasts five years later about getting person/man/woman/camera/TV right - things are getting addled and toxic enough others are summoning the specter of 1930s Germany and noting, "Trump gave a speech. It was weird. Super weird. Why isn't the media's hair on fire?" The AP called a recent speech to California Repubs "occasionally dark and profane"; others argued it was more accurately "some weird shit,” and not just because he jeered shoplifters would be shot on sight. He also said he won an election against Obama, you need ID to buy a loaf of bread, Marxists, atheists and "evil forces are destroying our country," windmills are driving whales crazy, all the "dry canals will be brimming and used to irrigate everything including your homes and bathrooms - if you had dampened floors you wouldn't have forest fires," he thinks "they wanna keep you close to home - they've got some crazy plan," and rich people from Beverly Hills "generally don't smell so good."

Then he gave a speech in Iowa - many farmers, few electric boats, fewer sharks, but despite "being cognitively all there," it didn't make much of an imprint - where he said sobbing farmers were coming up to him to "praise and thank" him: "They were crying, many of them crying. People that had never cried before." He boasted about saving Christmas - "We brought back Christmas. We brought back a lot of things" - railed against "far-left lunatics," and continued his vendetta against renewable energy by going off on electric cars that render their drivers "somewhat schizophrenic," windmills "making whales a little bit batty," and boats fueled by electric batteries too heavy to float that would ultimately electrocute him when they went down, still better than death at the teeth of his longtime nemesis, sharks. "If I'm sitting down and that boat’s going down and I’m on top of a battery, and the water starts flooding in, I’m getting concerned. But then I look 10 yards to my left and there’s a shark," he babbled. "So I have a choice of electrocution or a shark. You know what I’m going to take? Electrocution," though he twists and mangles it into "eleculution." "Electrocution! I will take electrocution every single time! Do we agree? Electrocution!" Yeah, sure, go for it.

And then he was in court in New York, still not getting it, giving a beaming, two-teeny-thumbs-up at day's end thinking the judge had reversed himself on an earlier court ruling that would "knock out 80% of this sham case." That night, he was back to whining as the hosts of late night TV returned after the writers' strike to roast him; on Jimmy Kimmel, Arnold Schwarzenegger helpfully suggested the "6'3, strawberry-blond, 215 pound" perp could get in shape with "some laps around a jail cell." Back in court Tuesday, Engoron began by correcting what Trump said on TV: He had not reversed himself, earlier abuses can be cited, and every lie "starts the statute of limitations running again." Trump took this news with his usual grace, slamming the case as a "fraud," flailing out at Engoron’s law clerk Allison Greenfield - "She hates Trump more than he does" - and posting a photo of her with Chuck Schumer to charge, like any petulant 10-year-old, that "Schumer's girlfriend" is running this case (and it) should be dismissed immediately.” The tantrum earned him a limited gag order from the judge banning him from "posting, emailing or speaking publicly about any of my staff." Still, given the level of mad pestilence, one wearies of half-measures. Why not jail instead? Or sharks.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Abby Zimet.

That’s according to Sarah Steinberg, the Head of Global Public Policy Partnerships at social media platform LinkedIn, who was here at UN Headquarters this week to talk about trends in the job market and gender disparities in science and technology.

She told UN News’s Maoqi Li that while change in the workplace has major implications for us all, it doesn't represent ‘a runway train’ beyond our control

This content originally appeared on UN News - Global perspective Human stories and was authored by Maoqi Li.

That’s according to Sarah Steinberg, the Head of Global Public Policy Partnerships at social media platform LinkedIn, who was here at UN Headquarters this week to talk about trends in the job market and gender disparities in science and technology.

She told UN News’s Maoqi Li that while change in the workplace has major implications for us all, it doesn't represent ‘a runway train’ beyond our control

This content originally appeared on UN News - Global perspective Human stories and was authored by Maoqi Li.

The post Letter from London: More Efficient Means for Going Backwards appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Peter Bach.

Photo by Ouael Ben Salah

Sometime since the start of the Ukraine War, prices went up and didn’t really ever go back down. At first the problem was the moronic sanctions on Russian energy, which made every trip to the gas station as expensive as purchasing a new laptop. That imbecilic fiasco lasted for months. But finally, the prices dropped. (The president wised up to the tornado of voter fury this wild expense, left unchecked, would unleash.) They didn’t fall as low as they were pre-sanctions, but were not so high that filling the tank drained the checking account. Utility bills, however, shot up and basically stayed up. Though they since sank from their insane 2022 highs, they’re still confiscatory. So is the cost of groceries. And forget shopping for household items – that puts a capital G in “gouging.”

Inflation is with us, period. It may have eased a bit from its recent 40-year high, but, the Washington Post told us August 10 “falling inflation doesn’t mean prices are returning to pre-pandemic levels.” This article then blames rent for most recently driving the inflationary mess, before listing six items whose costs gyrated wildly in recent years: used cars, rent, gas, airfare, cereal and baked goods and eggs. And when I say gyrated, I mean soared, then did not plummet. They may have dropped a bit, but they’re still in the stratosphere compared to where they were seven or eight years ago. And the kleptocrats in Washington couldn’t care less. Why should a multimillionaire congressman worry about the cost of butter? He probably only eats in swanky restaurants anyway.

Have you flown lately? Most sane people do it as little as possible, since it tears up the environment and exposes a person to covid more effectively than any other foray into the marketplace. But for those of us with far-flung family, it’s an occasional though regular necessity, and it costs a freaking fortune. Not only that, but the pandemic legacy of overbooked flights, cancelled flights and the nightmare of non-existent staff to answer telephone queries, makes the whole experience something only a masochist could enjoy. It’s hard to say what’s worse: the initial ticket sticker shock or the very real possibility that you’ll have to shell out for a hotel at some distant airport, because the airline cancelled your connecting flight.

Meanwhile the geniuses at the Federal Reserve decided last year that the cause of these skyrocketing prices was worker compensation. Hello? Could somebody please shoot the memo to Fed chairman Jerome Powell that wages are in the toilet? And while you’re at it, remind him that mega corporations in America discovered in a big way, at least at the start of this century, that they were monopolies and therefore could jack up prices whenever they felt like it. They also deduced that the government wouldn’t do anything about it, because antitrust laws are a dead letter as far as gouging consumers is concerned.

And if those giant firms were financial – well, surprise, surprise, they could do whatever they wanted, commit any idiocies or crimes and the government would bail them out. Barack “Evict the Homeowners” Obama was the great mind who pioneered this disgusting form of corruption after the 2008 crash. As a candidate, he promised to rescue the beleaguered little guy, but once elected, did a full 180-degree pivot and stabbed denizens of Main Street in the back. Obama showered Wall Street crooks with all the money the presses could print, thus guaranteeing hyper-inflation somewhere further down the road. We seem lately to have begun approaching that somewhere more rapidly than the stupids who arranged this meeting ever predicted.

Lately it’s become trendy for politicos, economic bigwigs and the propaganda outlets that pass for a free press to crow about “inflation going back down,” or “receding.” According to Zerohedge August 25, those claims really only reference the Consumer Price Index. But “true inflation is cumulative – A 10 percent increase one year and a five percent increase the next year is not a win, it means that you are now paying 15 percent more on average for everything you buy in the span of only two years.” Without a wage increase – and for the vast majority of Americans those are as likely as cool breezes in Phoenix from June to September – that means you’re 15 percent poorer.

“When CPI falls, this does not mean that prices on goods and services are going down, it only indicates that prices are rising slower than they were the month or the year before,” the article explains. So forget all the happy talk about Bidenomics, whatever that is, curing inflation. It’s just more hooey to distract you from your wallet being on a diet.

Worse, Joe “Master of Climate Change Doubletalk” Biden “has been dumping U.S. strategic oil reserves on the market for the past year,” to conceal the disastrous effects of sanctioning Russian energy. “Biden has artificially manipulated the CPI down, using one key resource. Now that his ability to dump oil reserves has ended, the CPI will rise once again with energy prices.” Unless of course, the U.S. buys oil from Iran, something the Biden Bunch has evinced interest in. It’s difficult to gauge the zeal with which the white house will pursue energy from Iran, but never underestimate the tenacity of its fossil fuel monomania. Anything, I guess, rather than going full bore on renewables.

But even with Iranian oil, we’re in for hard times. That’s due to foreign de-dollarization and major American creditors like China and Saudi Arabia ditching U.S. Treasuries, which they know very well are a huge liability in the event of Washington’s omnicidal and suicidal sanctions. USTs have lost their luster abroad, for a variety of reasons – brainless economic policies at home and foreign policy that only appeals to sociopaths. But when Treasuries are in trouble, and the dollar is in trouble, so are ordinary Americans. The solution is NOT doubling down on the nitwit policies that caused the problem in the first place, but that’s all our mindless leaders can imagine.

Years of sanctions on Syria have done zip to dislodge its president? The great minds in the white house have a solution: do more of what doesn’t work. Make ordinary Syrians so hungry and sick that they flee en masse to places like Turkey and Lebanon, and later possibly Europe. Same with Iran and Venezuela. True, sanctions torture the population, a price, in Madeleine “Let the Kids Die” Albright’s words that the Empire considers “worth it.” What sanctions don’t do is replace a government that imperial mandarins regard as odious, but the delusion that that they will has afflicted Washington for decades.

So eventually Bidenomics will be unmasked as the bad joke it is. The only benefit is that this reveal means that publicly napping, warmonger Joe “Russia Has Lost” Biden will nosedive in the election. Let us all pray Cornel West wins. Because if he doesn’t, the next stage direction is “Enter Trump.”

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Eve Ottenberg.

Photograph Source: shizhao – CC BY-SA 2.0

The United States suffered from a massive loss of manufacturing jobs in the 00s. This has come to be known as the “China Shock,” since it was associated with a flood of imports, especially from China, and a rapid rise in the U.S. trade deficit.

In the decade from December of 1999 to December of 2009, the economy lost more than 5.8 million manufacturing jobs, or more than one in three of the manufacturing jobs at the start of the decade. The vast majority of this job loss took place before the start of the Great Recession in December of 2007.

This sort of job loss was not typical for the manufacturing sector. While it lost jobs in the 1990s also, the drop was just 601,000, a bit more than one tenth as much as in the next decade. Since 2009, the manufacturing sector has actually been adding jobs, so the plunge in jobs in the manufacturing sector in the first decade of this century really was an anomaly.

The loss of manufacturing jobs, which had been more highly unionized and better paying than most jobs in the private sector, also had a devastating impact on many cities and towns across the industrial Midwest. When the manufacturing jobs left town, so did much of the tax revenue and purchasing power.

A recent piece in the Guardian implied that the job loss associated with a green transition could provide a comparable hit to the labor market. This is not true.

The number of jobs plausibly at stake in a green transition is almost certainly less than one-tenth as large as was the case with the China shock. The basis for the Guardian piece is a recent NBER paper by Mark Curtis, Layla Kane, and Jisung Park, that looked at what happened to workers who transitioned out of jobs in fossil fuels or related industries. The paper found that a relatively small share of these workers found jobs in green sectors of the economy. It also found that a large share of these workers ending up taking jobs in occupations that paid considerably less than the jobs they lost.

While this is not a good picture, it is important to get a sense of the number of workers involved. The paper analyzed just over 1.7 million transitions from jobs in fossil fuels and related industries, over the 21 years from 2002-2022.[1] By comparison, data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey indicate that there were more than 44 million instances where workers left or were fired from manufacturing jobs, in the nine years from 2001 through 2009. (The Survey starts in December of 2000.)[2]

These figures are not entirely comparable, since presumably people who retired or dropped out of the labor force were not counted as making transitions in the Curtis, Kane, and Park piece.  Also, some of the people in the JOLTS data likely appear multiple times from the same job. For example, if a worker was laid off more than once from a job, they could count two or more times in the JOLTS data, whereas they would not be counted as making a transition unless they found a new job with another employer.

While recognizing these inconsistences, it still likely the case that the number of people leaving manufacturing jobs in the nine years from 2001 to 2009 was close to 20 times as large as the number of people transitioning out of fossil fuels and related industries in the 21 years from 2002 to 2022. Adjusting for the differences in the number of years, the job loss in manufacturing is close to forty times as much on an annual basis as the transitions associated with the shift to a green economy.

The job loss associated with the conversion to a green economy should not be trivialized. For many workers and their families, the loss of a good-paying job in the oil or gas industry can be traumatic. In many cases they will never find a job that pays a comparable wage. But it is a mistake to imply that the number of jobs at risk is comparable to the number of manufacturing jobs lost to trade in the first decade of the century.

It would be great if government support can facilitate the transitions for the affected workers, but the downside risk here is nowhere near as large as what we saw due to the opening of trade in manufacturing goods in the 00s. It would be unfortunate if the fossil fuel industry used this risk as an excuse to slow the transition to a green economy.

Notes.

[1] This number was obtained by using the percentage of transitions from each sector in tables 2a and 2b.

[2] Job turnover is much less than net job loss because new workers typically fill jobs that other workers left, and job creation in factories that are growing offsets job loss in factories with declining employment.

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.  

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Dean Baker.

From Maui, we hear from a survivor of Hawaii’s historic wildfires, which have taken at least 55 lives to date. Vixay Phonxaylinkham, a resident of California, was on vacation with his wife and five children when they had to jump into the ocean to escape the raging fires and floated on a piece of wood for hours. “We stuck together. We held on. We’re not going to die this way. We’re here. We’re alive,” said Phonxaylinkham.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

The 13-year-old is one of 14 Hawaiʻi youth suing the state Department of Transportation over its role in promoting greenhouse gas emissions that are warming the planet. A circuit court judge ruled Thursday that the trial will start June 24 in Honolulu’s environmental court. 

“I can see every day how climate change is affecting everyone’s life and has significantly affected mine as well,” Kaliko said in an interview Monday. She is identified by her first name only in court documents due to her age. 

Kaliko was calling from her home in west Maui, where she was holding two ice packs on her head to keep cool in Monday’s sweltering heat as her chickens hid in the shade of a pine tree. The teenager worried how a hotter world will make it harder for her to do the things she loves, like biking, surfing, and gardening.

“I joined this case so nobody would have to experience what I have experienced and so I can make the world a better place,” she said. 

Five years ago, her family lost its home in Hurricane Olivia. The winds had weakened to a tropical storm by the time they hit her home island of Maui, but the storm still downed power lines and flooded houses. It was the first tropical storm to hit the island in recorded history. 

Climate change is not only expected to lead to hotter weather but also more frequent and more powerful storms globally. Children born in 2020 are between two and seven times as likely to experience an extreme weather event compared to people born in 1960. 

Like most of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, Kaliko is Native Hawaiian.  A warming world threatens Indigenous cultural practices, like growing taro, that Hawaiians have engaged in for generations. Increasingly scarce water has forced Kaliko’s family to change how it grows the crop so it has enough to make poi, a traditional starch.

Their lawsuit, Nawahine v. the Hawaiʻi Department of Transportation, filed in English and the Hawaiian language, argues that the agency prioritizes transportation projects like highway construction that, according to the suit, “lock in and escalate the use of fossil fuels, rather than projects that mitigate and reduce emissions.”

The Department of Transportation declined to comment.

The case is part of a broader youth-led push to hold governments legally accountable for their role in exacerbating the climate crisis. 

A state judge in Montana is expected to rule any day now in Held v. Montana, in which 16 young Montana residents call out the state’s role in promoting the fossil fuel industry. It is the first lawsuit of its kind to reach a trial. The youth argue that the state’s support of fossil fuels violates their right, enshrined in Article II of the state constitution, to a “clean and healthful environment.” 

The plaintiffs in both cases are represented by Our Children’s Trust, a nonprofit founded 13 years ago in Oregon to sue on behalf of children’s right to a safe climate. It has filed cases in all 50 states and at the federal level, most without success. 

What’s significant about the Hawaiʻi and Montana cases is how far they’ve gotten, said Dan Farber, a law professor and expert in climate litigation at the University of California at Berkeley. The Hawaiʻi case would be only the second to see a trial. 

“These cases are really good choices to establish precedents that can be built upon later,” Farber said, adding that the fact the Hawaiʻi case is going to trial could encourage judges in states to allow similar cases to proceed.

Both cases hinge on the right, written into each state’s constitution, to a clean and healthful environment. They also accuse state officials of neglecting their duty to preserve and protect the environment for future generations. But where youth in Montana are calling out their stateʻs enthusiastic promotion of the fossil fuel industry, their peers in Hawaiʻi are zeroing in on car-related emissions because the state has set a goal of achieving net-negative carbon emissions by 2045.

Kylie Wagner Cruz, an attorney at the legal nonprofit Earthjustice, is representing the youth plaintiffs along with Our Children’s Trust. She said she’s confident about her clients’ chances, particularly since the Hawaiʻi Supreme Court has already ruled that the state constitutional right to a clean and healthful environment includes the “right to a life-sustaining climate system.”“We have an opportunity with this case to transform Hawaiʻi’s transportation system to benefit all of Hawaiʻi’s people,” Cruz said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Hawaiʻi’s youth-led climate change lawsuit is going to trial next summer on Aug 7, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Anita Hofschneider.

The post “Is It Going to Get Us?” Climate Dystopia, Borders and the Future appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Todd Miller.

Hans Schmitz, an Indiana wheat farmer, made a difficult decision this year. In a last-minute call, he planted only 100 acres of wheat, roughly half the amount of seed he usually grows. The soil just wouldn’t allow for any more. 

“We felt it was too dry. And when we did get rain right at the end of the planting window, we had some issues with flooding,” he says.

Instead, Schmitz opted to plant soybeans—a less lucrative crop. “We sacrificed on the scale of 100 bucks an acre.”

Schmitz isn’t the only farmer challenged by a changing climate. So far, however, those challenges have not resulted in lower crop yields. Just the opposite. American farmers are producing more than ever, USDA statistics show. 

The United States saw record yields across the board in 2021 at 894 pounds per acre—a 21-percent increase from the year before—according to the USDA. Yields were down slightly from those record figures in 2022, but they were still above average.

Crop production has improved by multiple metrics, says Ariel Ortiz-Bobea, an applied economist who studies the impact of climate change on agriculture at Cornell. “What you really want to know is how all the outputs are growing relative to the inputs [such as water and fertilizer],” he says. “That gives you a measure of how productive you are.”

Even by this measurement, agricultural productivity is on the rise, says Ortiz-Bobea, citing USDA data. Farm output is even outpacing population growth, he says, meaning farmers are still producing more than enough to feed everyone in the United States.

But researchers wonder how long those technologies and innovations can stay ahead of a warming world. A 2021 Cornell study, for example, found that farmers have lost seven years of productivity growth over the last 60 years because of climate change.

Ortiz-Bobea notes climate change decimated cropland in parts of the global south, leading to widespread malnutrition and mass migration, and he hopes the struggles in those regions are not a harbinger of what is to come in the United States as the world grows hotter and dryer.

How does climate change impact crops?

Production has trended upward in recent years, even as drought ravaged the southern sun belt and heavy spring rains overwhelmed midwestern fields. Farmers and experts attribute increased production to advances in agricultural techniques and a better understanding of how crops handle bad weather.

“Farmers have large, high-speed GPS-controlled planters, and they can plant a lot of crops in a short amount of time even though the window to plant might be shorter,” says Fred Below, a crop physiologist and professor at the University of Illinois.

Still, according to Below, “The weather is the number one factor that influences crop yield.” 

In some ways, a warming world helps farmers. Warmer weather extended planting seasons by between 10 and 15 days in the Midwest. But the harmful conditions far outweigh any benefits, experts say.

“We’re seeing warmer lows,” says Dennis Todey, director of the USDA Midwest Climate Hub. “Nights are not cooling down as much and that has a different look than if you have warmer daytime highs.” Higher nighttime temperatures stress crops. Soybeans, for example, grow more quickly in warmer conditions, which reduces yields.

“We see warmer temperatures in February and March, and small grains such as winter wheat will grow and enter reproductive stages earlier. Then you get a cold spell in April or May and you can see frost damage because [the plant is] triggered to grow earlier than it should,” says Laura Lindsey, a soybean and small grain agronomist at Ohio State University’s extension service.

But one of the most difficult changes to cope with is rainfall. As the climate changes, spring rains are growing more intense and summers are experiencing more prolonged droughts.

Total rainfall is rising in some parts of the country, but periods of rain are growing fewer and further between—rather than 15 days with two inches or rain, regions such as the midwest might experience 10 days with four inches of rain.

“One of the biggest things we’re seeing in Illinois is an increase in rainfall and rainfall intensity,” says Illinois State Climatologist Trent Ford. “It’s about five inches wetter, which wouldn’t be a big deal if patterned out in the right way. A lot of that is coming in increasing intensity, with really large amounts of rain.”

To make matters worse, soil can only absorb so much water and the excess erodes into nearby rivers and streams, taking expensive fertilizer with it.

“You’re left with a fraction of your fertilizer for the crop,” says Ford.

Agricultural resilience

Experts note that American farmers have an advantage over growers in less developed nations because the United States has a department of agriculture that researches growing conditions and land grant universities in every state, with extension services working directly with farmers. The USDA also offers monetary help such as crop insurance that gives farmers financial assurances.

Crops such as corn and soybeans are also bred to use less water or to grow to a shorter height, making it less vulnerable to the intense winds that come with climate change.

“There are marker-assisted genetics in corn that impart some water use traits,” says Below. “These contain marker-assisted genes that optimize water use.”

However, experts like Ortiz-Bobea warn that the same planting techniques helping farmers adapt now could hurt them in the future if drought proliferates. For example, corn farmers are planting rows of corn closer together to squeeze the highest yield out of limited acres.

In some respects, this strategy works. However, when roots are closer together, competition for scarce water intensifies, making the crop more vulnerable to drought, says Ortiz-Bobea.

How long can technology overtake climate?

Researchers disagree over whether or not the increase in crop yields is sustainable with climate change hovering over the agriculture industry like the sword of Damocles.

“Climate change is not the destroyer of agriculture in Illinois,” says Ford. “The negative impacts are making things a bit more complicated. It’s changing things, and so it really requires a broad perspective of how we’re doing agriculture in the Midwest and maybe we can do it more effectively in the face of these changes.”

However, data shows that a warming planet has made a difference. In a study of crop production last year, researchers at Cornell concluded that yields would be 21% higher over the past 50 years if the weather was consistent from year to year.

And the extreme rain and prolonged drought vexing farmers are only projected to get worse.

“These very bad years are going to become more frequent,” says Ortiz-Bobea.

While some experts are hopeful, no one can say with certainty that advances in science and technology will continue to make up for the increasing frequency of drought and extreme rain.

If the temperature and precipitation continue to change at the pace growers have seen in recent years, a warming world may eventually outpace farmers’ capacity to adapt to it.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Farmers are struggling with climate change, but yields continue to rise. What’s going on? on Jul 23, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Patrick Cooley, Modern Farmer.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) held its annual summit on 11–12 July in Vilnius, Lithuania. The communiqué released after the first day’s proceedings claimed that ‘NATO is a defensive alliance’, a statement that encapsulates why many struggle to grasp its true essence. A look at the latest military spending figures shows, to the contrary, that NATO countries, and countries closely allied to NATO, account for nearly three-quarters of the total annual global expenditure on weapons. Many of these countries possess state-of-the-art weapons systems, which are qualitatively more destructive than those held by the militaries of most non-NATO countries. Over the past quarter century, NATO has used its military might to destroy several states, such as Afghanistan (2001) and Libya (2011), shattering societies with the raw muscle of its aggressive alliance, and end the status of Yugoslavia (1999) as a unified state. It is difficult, given this record, to sustain the view that NATO is a ‘defensive alliance’.

Currently, NATO has thirty-one member states, the most recent addition being Finland, which joined in April 2023. Its membership has more than doubled since its twelve founding members, all countries in Europe and North America that had been part of the war against the Axis powers, signed its founding treaty (the Washington Treaty or the North Atlantic Treaty) on 4 April 1949. It is telling that one of these original members – Portugal – remained under a fascist dictatorship at the time, known as Estado Novo (in place from 1933 until 1974).

Article 10 of this treaty declares that NATO members – ‘by unanimous agreement’ – can ‘invite any other European state’ to join the military alliance. Based on that principle, NATO welcomed Greece and Turkey (1952), West Germany (1955), and Spain (1982), expanding its membership at the time to include sixteen countries. The disintegration of the USSR and communist states in Eastern Europe – the purported threat that compelled the need for NATO to begin with – did not put an end to the need for the alliance. Instead, NATO’s increasing membership has doubled down on its ambition to use its military power, through Article 5, to subdue anyone who challenges the ‘Atlantic Alliance’.

Nino Morbedadze (Georgia), Strolling Couple, 2017.

The ‘Atlantic Alliance’, a phrase that is part of NATO’s name, was part of a wider network of military treaties secured by the US against the USSR and, after October 1949, against the People’s Republic of China. This network included the Manila Pact of September 1954, which created the Southeast Asian Treaty Organisation (SEATO), and the Baghdad Pact of February 1955, which created the Central Treaty Organisation (CENTO). Turkey and Pakistan signed a military agreement in April 1954 which brought them together in an alliance against the USSR and anchored this network through NATO’s southernmost member (Turkey) and SEATO’s westernmost member (Pakistan). The US signed a military deal with each of the members of CENTO and SEATO and ensured that it had a seat at the table in these structures.

At the Asian-African Conference held in Bandung, Indonesia in April 1955, India’s Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru reacted strongly to the creation of these military alliances, which exported tensions between the US and the USSR across Asia. The concept of NATO, he said, ‘has extended itself in two ways’: first, NATO ‘has gone far away from the Atlantic and has reached other oceans and seas’ and second, ‘NATO today is one of the most powerful protectors of colonialism’. As an example, Nehru pointed to Goa, which was still held by fascist Portugal and whose grip had been validated by NATO members – an act, Nehru said, of ‘gross impertinence’. This characterisation of NATO as a global belligerent and defender of colonialism remains intact, with some modifications.

Slobodan Trajković (Yugoslavia), The Flag, 1983.

SEATO was disbanded in 1977, partly due to the defeat of the US in Vietnam, and CENTO was shuttered in 1979, precisely due to the Iranian Revolution that year. US military strategy shifted its focus from wielding these kinds of pacts to establishing a direct military presence with the founding of US Central Command in 1983 and the revitalisation of the US Pacific Command that same year. The US expanded the power of its own global military footprint, including its ability to strike anywhere on the planet due to its structure of military bases and armed flotillas (which were no longer restricted once the 1930 Second London Naval Treaty expired in 1939). Although NATO has always had global ambitions, the alliance was given material reality through the US military’s force projection and its creation of new structures that further tied allied states into its orbit (with programmes such as ‘Partnership for Peace’, set up in 1994, and concepts such as ‘global NATO partner’ and ‘non-NATO ally’, as exemplified by Japan and South Korea). In its 1991 Strategic Concept, NATO wrote that it would ‘contribute to global stability and peace by providing forces for United Nations missions’, which was realised with deadly force in Yugoslavia (1999), Afghanistan (2003), and Libya (2011).

By the Riga Summit (2006), NATO was confident that it operated ‘from Afghanistan to the Balkans and from the Mediterranean Sea to Darfur’. Nehru’s focus on colonialism might seem anachronistic now, but, in fact, NATO has become an instrument to blunt the global majority’s desire for sovereignty and dignity, two key anti-colonial concepts. Any popular project that exerts these two concepts finds itself at the end of a NATO weapons system.

Shefa Salem al-Baraesi (Libya), Kaska, Dance of War, 2020.

The collapse of the USSR and the Eastern European communist state system transformed Europe’s reality. NATO quickly ignored the ‘ironclad guarantees’ offered by US Secretary of State James Baker to Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze in Moscow on 9 February 1990 that NATO’s ‘forces would not move eastward’ of the German border. Several states that bordered the NATO zone suffered greatly in the immediate period after the fall of the Berlin Wall, with economies in the doldrums as privatisation eclipsed the possibility for their populations to live with dignity. Many states in Eastern Europe, desperate to enter the European Union (EU), which at least promised access to the common market, understood that entry into NATO was the price of admission. In 1999, Czechia, Hungary, and Poland joined NATO, followed in 2004 by the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania), Bulgaria, Romania, Slovenia, and Slovakia. Eager for investments and markets, by 2004 many of these countries waltzed into the Atlantic Alliance of NATO and the EU.

NATO continued to expand, absorbing Albania and Croatia in 2009, Montenegro in 2017, and North Macedonia in 2020. However, the breakdown of some US banks, the waning attraction of the US as the market of last resort, and the entry of the Atlantic world into a relentless economic depression after 2007 changed the context. No longer were Atlantic states reliable as investors or as markets. After 2008, infrastructure investment in the EU declined by 75% due to reduced public spending, and the European Investment Bank warned that government investment would hit a twenty-five-year low.

ArtLords (including Kabir Mokamel, Abdul Hakim Maqsodi, Meher Agha Sultani, Omaid Sharifi, Yama Farhard, Negina Azimi, Enayat Hikmat, Zahid Amini, Ali Hashimi, Mohammad Razeq Meherpour, Abdul Razaq Hashemi, and Nadima Rustam), The Unseen Afghanistan, 2021.

The arrival of Chinese investment and the possibility of integration with the Chinese economy began to reorient many economies, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe, away from the Atlantic. In 2012, the first summit between China and central and eastern European countries (China–CEEC summit) was held in Warsaw (Poland), with sixteen countries in the region participating. The process eventually drew in fifteen NATO members, including Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia (in 2021 and 2022, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania withdrew from the initiative). In March 2015, six then-EU member states – France, Germany, Italy, Luxemburg, Sweden, and the UK – joined the Beijing-based Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. Four years later, Italy became the first G7 country to join the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Two-thirds of EU member states are now part of the BRI, and the EU concluded the Comprehensive Agreement on Investment in 2020.

These manoeuvres towards China threatened to weaken the Atlantic Alliance, with the US describing the country as a ‘strategic competitor’ in its 2018 National Defense Strategy – a phrase indicative of its shifting focus on the so-called threat of China. Nonetheless, as recently as November 2019, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said that ‘there [are] no plans, no proposal, no intention to move NATO into, for instance, the South China Sea’. However, by 2020, the mood had changed: a mere seven months later, Stoltenberg said, ‘NATO does not see China as the new enemy or an adversary. But what we see is that the rise of China is fundamentally changing the global balance of power’. NATO’s response has been to work with its partners – including Australia, Japan, New Zealand, and South Korea – ‘to address… the security consequences of the rise of China’, Stoltenberg continued. The talk of a global NATO and an Asian NATO is front and centre in these deliberations, with Stoltenberg stating in Vilnius that the idea of a liaison office in Japan is ‘on the table’.

The war in Ukraine provided new life to the Atlantic Alliance, driving several hesitant European countries – such as Sweden – into its ranks. Yet, even amongst people living within NATO countries there are groups who are sceptical of the alliance’s aims, with the Vilnius summit marked by anti-NATO protests. The Vilnius Summit Communiqué underlined Ukraine’s path into NATO and sharpened NATO’s self-defined universalism. The communiqué declares, for instance, that China challenges ‘our interests, security, and values’, with the word ‘our’ claiming to represent not only NATO countries but the entire international order. Slowly, NATO is positioning itself as a substitute for the UN, suggesting that it – and not the actual international community – is the arbiter and guardian of the world’s ‘interests, security, and values’. This view is contested by the vast majority of the world’s peoples, seven billion of whom do not even reside in NATO’s member countries (whose total population is less than one billion). Those billions wonder why it is that NATO wants to supplant the United Nations.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Vijay Prashad.

Caufield Schnug: It was chaos, we could have lost our career fields more or less in Boston. We left in 2020, moved in with my parents as so many people did, which is actually fairly lovely. But we were in my childhood bedroom for a year. We were dealing with a record advance, which is more money than we’ve ever had in savings, but also in our scheme of things, not very much money to maneuver. But we could afford a house in Kansas. So we were looking all over the country. We were going to put a down payment on a church in Ohio that was selling for $80,000 in a very small town.

Lira Mondale: A small town outside of Youngstown, which is itself very small. We were making these maneuvers in the summer of 2021, right before we were going on tour. We were trying to figure out how to bring Sweeping Promises to a live show after only having played one show before the pandemic. And then on top of that, just maneuvering our newfound relationship with Sub Pop and reconciling that with still wanting to be on Feel It, which as you can tell, has been fine. The album’s coming out on both labels, and everyone’s been lovely to work with, but there was still just so much to tread through in addition to still being in the middle of the pandemic. Your parents advised us to at least go look at the church, because when you live in a coastal city, you’re very used to sight-unseen housing. We came, we saw, we did not conquer that castle.

Caufield: Lawrence was quite unspecific, but we love being here incidentally. It’s been wonderful.

Lira: Honestly, it’s the studio that sold the house. We looked at 10 houses the day before in Kansas City, and then this ’50s style ranch house just popped up on Zillow. We drive up to this residential cul-de-sac near the university, walk in, and see this cathedral-esque space that is so organically beautiful. It has all this light and has the spirit of art in it, because the previous owners were artists as well. So it was a very intentionally crafted space, and we felt that. And I think that that’s what drew us magnetically. As soon as we saw it and we heard the reverberance of the room and saw the high-pitched ceilings, we just looked at each other and we then looked at Caufield’s aunt, who was our real estate agent, and we said, let’s put in an offer right now, immediately. Let’s lock this up.

How do different recording environments impact your creative process as you’re building out new songs? Do you write songs knowing that they’re going to be recorded in a particular space?

Caufield: I like recording in super imprecise spaces. I don’t like the ideology or mindset of control that a lot of recordings go after now. We think of the atmosphere as part of the instrumentation and also part of the feeling that you try to capture in recording. We still alter the space. We’ll change it around and add dampening depending on the song. I really think the atmosphere or the site specificity as part of the recording.

Lira: Every single time we go in to record here, the setup is a little bit different. There’ll be one day where Caulfield wants to baffle his amp in one way and might get a particular way, and then the very next day he’ll change it. Even if just a small measure, it’s still incredibly different. It’s a very malleable space that we’ve got, which is super beneficial, but then also presents its own challenges in terms of continuity. The beauty of it is that we can just leave things set up and then walk into a ready to work situation at will, which is huge compared to sharing a space with five or six other bands in a very highly populated urban center.

Your previous record was recorded on this single mic technique, which you’re not using this time around. What techniques did you use in place of a single mic?

Caufield: The recordings are fake-y mono. We cut a lot of corners. There are stereo synths every now and then on some of the songs. Some of them are true mono, if I remember right. We were trying to be militant about it, but it was hard to pull off in this space. We broke our promise. There is multi-micing, but there aren’t a lot of multi mics.

Lira: I think it’s mostly just where the drums are concerned, and it makes sense because it’s condensed, but there’s still very much the same amount of tail and echo. You have more mics now. It didn’t sound as good with just one mic. We tried it on the drums.

Caufield: What do you call that mathematical principle?

Lira: Occam’s razor?

Caufield: Yeah, that’s right. Our margin is getting wider and wider. We’re adding more surfaces. It’s a slightly more complexified recording, but we still want to be cave people. We’re talking a very minimal monophonic sort of setup. We still try to move as fast as sin.

Was there more pressure on Good Living Is Coming For You now that you are signed to Sub Pop and that there was going to be maybe more of a promotion around it?

Caufield: I wouldn’t say it had anything to do with the label. It was us deciding to do music with our lives and being beholden to music in a different way.

Lira: Took the words right out of my mouth.

Caufield: For instance, our last album we released in the spirit of literally, “No one’s going to listen to this one.” It was purely for friends. And I think the mindset couldn’t be more different this time around where we feel as if we have to have a career. So that’d be the big change and that’s not coming from Sub Pop.

Lira: We were allowed all of a sudden the opportunity to even think about this as a career, as opposed to Hunger for a Way Out, which was, as Caulfield said, testing the waters only for ourselves, because we were ready to do something else immediately after releasing that. We are prone to jumping genre-ship at least yearly, if not semi-annually.

Interviewer: How did you shake off that pressure and stay loose and creative, knowing that you were making it with the intent of people listening to it instead of just for yourselves.

Caufield: Loose and creative? No, no, no. You lean into the tribulation. We’re very stressed out people. Are you loose?

Lira: I’m not loose. I’m wound very tight. We kept setting these deadlines for ourselves, and we kept exceeding them, passing them. We finally just said, this is going to happen when it happens, and we can’t put a deadline on creativity. There were a lot of songs that went through multiple iterations. We started to figure out what making music as a career means. I was very much attached to the first iteration of a song as that being the ideal. Caufield’s like, “Let’s tease it out. Let’s expand it. We’re in a new space. It doesn’t mean that you have to be so religious about the first take.” When we were in [previous studio] Garden Street, we were working just a little bit faster. We had to have everything done immediately because we were sneaking in under the cover of darkness to record. Now things are a little more relaxed; if an idea’s not working, you can come back to it in a couple of hours or another day and try it again, because this is your space and your home. I think that’s something that we’re still sort of working on, being more flexible.

Caufield: Lira’s very disciplined. We’re control freaks.

Lira: After 14 years of working together, we are both very much control freaks, but now all of a sudden, both our different kinds of control freakiness are coming to—

Caufield: An awful resolution. We’re like control freaks who believe in automatic writing or something that’s like this weird mismatch.

Lira: We’re pretty laid back people. But then something happens when you start creating, and then you either view it as an extension of yourself, or you’re trying to have this remove from your idea or a global idea, even though it’s coming from you. But then you’re also working with a partner and a collaborator, and so you’re just constantly doing this dance of how does this reflect who I am, but not become overly personal? How does it stay mysterious? You’re trying to pull these threads in the universe that you want to pull, but not entangling you in the process or the other person.

Lira, when we last spoke in 2021, you were making chocolate bean-to-bar, I believe. Are you still making chocolate? And if so, do you find that your creativity in culinary arts is informed by your creativity as a musician and vice versa?

Lira: I have not bought beans, I don’t think, since the last time we talked. I was still working on the last batch that I had made, and so I need to get more because I need to roast more. I’ve had all these ideas—I want to play around with making different kinds of white chocolate with different infusions, and basically, I’m still very much in love with that world and interested in it, but I’ve put it off to the side.

Being in a place that has a front and a backyard, for instance, all of a sudden I am privy to the daily lives of a bunch of little creatures. I’ve been observing the birds and the rabbits and the lizards around here. I want to get back into reading more and watching more film. All of this is just contingent on having free time for music, and right now, we’re in the process of working on a couple of albums and then Caufield’s got a fully packed schedule as well. The short answer is I’m still very much into baking and pastry, and I’ve been making a lot of cakes for people. I’ve gotten back into making celebration cakes for parties, and it’s been really lovely to kind of dip my toe back into it. It’s something that kind of ebbs and flows, my desire to make pastry and chocolate and things like that. But when I do it, I still find joy in it.

What do you do to relax?

Lira: We watch The Sopranos. It’s very relaxing show. Puts me in my Zen mode.

Caufield: We’re cinephilic.

Lira: Our library has a really, really great collection. So in addition to the Criterion Channel, which we subscribe to, we also just go to the library and pick out DVDs that suit our fancy.

Caufield, I wanted to ask about your mixing and mastering work as Melody Men Mastering. When you’re mastering records for other artists, how do you balance keeping the artist’s intent with your own opinions on the creative process?

Caufield Schnug: Oh, I’ll speak up. It depends on the projects, because if a band is coming with really specific sonic ideas, you want to honor that, and I respect a determined vision, and I want to be a part of a determined vision. But if a band is not so sure, perhaps they’re coming to me because they know I’m a little bit opinionated.

How do you view remastering a record like The Toms, versus a brand new record you’re mastering. Do you take a different approach?

Caufield: I just started doing some records that were in other time periods. The Toms was recorded 40 years ago. I’ve been working with a few other lost punk 7”s. I think a lot of that music falls into a disastrous archive, and needs repair.

The first thing you have to think about is, “What was this music sounding like?” You don’t want to preserve a faulty record that has been scratched and poorly digitized or whatever. Or it’s a third generation YouTube rip because the digital origin’s been lost or something. With The Toms, I did think about playing up the AM side and extremifying the niche aspects of the recording. I think what’s so great is the eccentricity of this dude [The Toms’ Tommy Marolda] who locked himself in a private space for so long doing deep recording. I think I try to intensify the oblique aspects of that media envelope that was his time period in his situation.

Lira: I feel like you sometimes extract things that you like from whatever project you’re working on, and then apply them to our method as well.

Caufield: Yeah. That’s one of the reasons why I do so much work on the outside. I feel like I’m a spy and I take ideas from others for our own.

You’ve recorded together in many bands across 14 years. How do you stay in the Sweeping Promises sound and mindset when you’re creative and make sure that you’re not accidentally writing music that would be better suited for another project?

Caufield: The short answer is that you make another project, which we did. And no one knows about it yet. We wrote another album for another project. That’s how you do it. You have to make the outside zone in order to dictate the inside zone. We started making music because we felt like there had to be this other net that caught the other impulses that were somehow outside of Sweeping Promises.

Lira: The thing that I love about our music and the beauty of it is that, excuse me, it is very personal to us. I feel like only we could have had these ideas at that moment, but we try to leave things very open-ended and approachable. But also, sometimes I won’t have a realization of something until months after I’ve written it that you can apply this sort of filter or way of translating it.

Something that was tripping me up is that everything has to be set in stone as far as the intention of a song, what it’s about, who’s speaking, who is being addressed in that moment. I’m letting that go. It’s a lifelong lesson, especially in this hyper narrative tradition of songwriting, both in punk and pop, where what you’re singing about has to be clear in the moment. There are some elements of ambiguity that have been lost. I think that it’s possible to be precise and ambiguous at the same time.

You have a line on your new record, “bury yourself in your work.” Is creating music labor for you, and do you bury yourself in it?

Caufield: Yes.

Lira: Yes. You are quite literally buried right now.

Caufield: Yeah, always. That’s life. I don’t know. I think we’re really lucky to have this type of labor, but music labor is labor. Sure.

Lira: It is. There’s the very basic physical element of you moving amps and heavy gear around. Thinking about music as a labor of love… It really truly is, especially now that we find ourselves in a small but robust DIY community in town, seeing other people’s beautiful labor come to fruition in the terms of putting on shows and connecting with one another. We inherited some really wonderful neighbors here who have opened their own studio to us to borrow gear, and it’s really been incredible to have that kind of connection and community.

Caufield: I think there are some associations with our band and labor consciousness, and obviously we feel sympathy towards this. We’re ex-workaholics. We can’t shake it. I don’t know what it is. It’s an impulse for us to go all in.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Arielle Gordon.

Papuan people throughout the territory of West Papua have held huge demonstrations of support for full membership of the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) in the Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG).

Delighted with the response but disappointed with the delay, organisers appealed to supporters to “keep going” with the solidarity.

The national action was scheduled to be held simultaneously throughout West Papua’s territory in seven provincial regions.

• READ MORE: Other West Papua reports

The MSG leaders summit was supposed to have opened on Monday but has now been postponed until August with the actual dates not yet decided.

In the highlands town of Wamena yesterday, thousands of people from the Laa-Pago Region thronged the municipality wearing traditional clothes and decorating their bodies with patterns of the Morning Star — Papua’s flag banned by Indonesia — and the five flags of the permanent members of the MSG — Fiji, Kanaky (FLNKS), Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu.

Other actions supporting the same MSG membership agenda were also staged in Jayapura City — outsid the residence of the chair of the West Papua Council, Buchtar Tabuni, at Kamwolker.

There were also solidarity demonstrations throughout West Papua, including in the Yapen Islands, Sorong, Manokwari, Merauke, Timika, Kaimana, Paniai, Biak, Serui, Merauke and several other regencies.

The ULMWP solidarity groups also delivered a four-point statement:

1. The United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) is a political organisation that legally represents the political aspirations of the Papuan people in an effort to fight for the right to self-determination for the people and nation of Papua in the western part of the island of New Guinea to gain independence and sovereignty from foreign colonialism.
2. We the people of West Papua declare that we fully support the ULMWP to become a full member of the Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG) as the official representation of West Papua from Sorong-Merauke;
3. We the people of the West Papua firmly declare that the colonial existence of the Republic of Indonesia (NKRI) in the MSG does not represent the people and nation of Papua from Sorong-Merauke; and
4. We fully declare our support and recognition of the ULMWP, referred to as the West Papua Provisional Government, attending the MSG Leader Summit (KTT-MSG) or MSG Leader Summit in Port Vila, Vanuatu, representing the people and nation of Papua from Sorong-Merauke.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

This difficult environment has made Florida one of the most expensive states in the country for property insurance, with prices about four times as high as the national average. Despite sky-high prices, however,t most insurers still can’t turn a profit. The financial pain for the industry got a lot worse last year thanks to Hurricane Ian, which slammed into the city of Fort Myers as a Category 4 storm and caused at least $60 billion in insured losses — more than any U.S. disaster since Hurricane Katrina in 2005. 

That’s been too much for some companies to bear. At least eight Florida carriers have gone bankrupt in the past two years. And just last week two major national insurers, AAA and Farmers, announced that they would trim their business in the state, pulling back from risky areas. The moves may jeopardize as many as 100,000 policies in the state. That’s around 2 percent of the entire state’s market.

“It is pretty rare to have this many insurers leaving a state at a similar time,” said Matthew Palazola, an insurance analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence who studies the Florida market. “Any of these companies leaving probably wouldn’t be hugely significant normally, but it’s more significant with the tide of leaving we’ve seen.”

These departures have forced more Floridians to buy insurance from a state-backed program called Citizens. The program is meant to be an “insurer of last resort” for people who can’t get coverage elsewhere, but it’s ballooned to record size this year as more private companies leave the state. By the end of the year it may have 1.7 million customers. In some areas like hurricane-prone Miami, more than two-thirds of homeowners depend on it.

Florida’s Republican leadership has tried to play down the recent departures as a blip, arguing that the industry is stable and that Citizens’ growth is temporary. The state’s chief financial officer, Jimmy Patronis, called Farmers “the Bud Light of insurance” in what appeared to be an attempt to suggest that its decision was politically motivated. Governor Ron DeSantis, meanwhile, insists that the market is on the mend thanks to recent reforms: Last year the Florida legislature cracked down on fraudulent litigation and created a new fund to help companies buy reinsurance, which experts believe will stall further bankruptcies. 

“It’s hopefully optimistic, but I think it still will take a long time,” said Palazola. “I haven’t heard any [insurers] say, ‘Oh, they put these reforms in place, that’s great, we’re all in.’ I’ve heard them say, ‘Let’s wait and see.’” Litigation has started to decline since last year’s reforms took effect, and if the trend continues some companies may come back to the market, but no one’s sure how well the new laws are working.

Even if Florida avoids a total market collapse, insurance prices are going to remain high, and that’s thanks in large part to climate change. Rapidly intensifying hurricanes like Ian are so large and so powerful that even healthy insurance companies have a hard time dealing with them, and many resort to fraud and deception rather than pay out all their claims. A Washington Post investigation found that several companies cut payments below required levels, leaving victims short on cash when they needed it most. 

Even during quiet seasons, the mere threat of a hurricane will keep prices high. In preparation for hurricane season, insurance companies buy reinsurance policies that can help them survive the cost burden of big storms, and those policies are getting more expensive: In the months after Hurricane Ian, multinational reinsurers raised prices by as much as 50 percent. 

Local companies in Florida are passing those costs onto their customers, who open their bills each year to find that their premiums are ticking higher. To make matters worse, many insurance policies aren’t sufficient to recover from storms. In Cape Coral, which bore the brunt of Hurricane Ian’s winds last year, many victims have found their insurance payouts are so  small they can’t afford to rebuild their homes.

Homeowners won’t see much relief any time soon, according to Palazola.

“In a middle-of-the-road scenario where the reforms work and there’s an average hurricane season, I could see a scenario where prices don’t go up dramatically from here,” he told Grist. “You’ve got an extreme scenario where we have a giant hurricane this year, and the reforms don’t work, you have more large insurers leaving, and the price becomes untenable, to the point where the average person feels it.”

Something similar is happening in other states that are vulnerable to climate disaster. In Louisiana, which has seen at least four major storms in the last few years, several private companies have collapsed since 2021’s Hurricane Ida, forcing more customers onto the state-backed plan. And multiple national insurers have fled California in recent weeks rather than try to make a profit selling policies in the state’s wildfire-prone mountains. There, too, homeowners have rushed to buy coverage from a state-backed insurer of last resort. In both of these states, prices have soared as natural disasters continue to strike.

If Hurricane Ian sent a big price shock through an unstable market, another storm this summer could deliver an even bigger blow, pushing more insurers away and forcing more Floridians onto the Citizens program. Industry leaders and top government officials insist that the state’s market could survive such an event without total collapse, but another storm would raise prices even further for millions of homeowners across the state. Not only would reinsurers push costs higher to account for the storm risk, but the state government would likely have to charge a tax assessment to keep Citizens afloat.

In other words, no matter how well the legislature clamps down on fraud, the mounting toll of climate change is going to make Florida a less affordable place to live. Even on a sunny day, the status quo is expensive.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Why Florida’s home insurance crisis isn’t going away on Jul 19, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Jake Bittle.

It starts out as unnoticeable, lying dormant for two or even four years. It’s undetectable. But slowly, the signs come out. Individual branches on a tree point to signs of a nutrient deficiency or perhaps overwatering. Branches will start to yellow and weaken, turning shriveled. Then, the fruit will turn, becoming small and refusing to ripen and, sometimes, dropping early. The fruit is safe for human consumption, but it tastes like battery acid. 

And once the tree reaches that point, there’s no coming back. The tree will die within a few years no matter what intervention you try. That’s why when growers see trees infected with Huanglongbing, known as HLB or citrus greening, they immediately look to remove the tree. There’s no other option. 

“We’re destroying all the trees that get infected. We’re monitoring and eradicating those where we can. We’re using biological controls with the loss. We’re using every tool in the bag,” says Jared Plumlee, senior vice president of farming at Booth Ranches, in Orange Cove, CA. Plumblee oversees about 7,000 acres in the central San Joaquin Valley, growing navel oranges, valencias, mandarins and even some lemons and grapefruits. There’s no sign of HLB in the Booth orchards yet, and Plumlee aims to keep it that way. The ranch also has its own packing house onsite, where they pack only their own product. That’s both to foster trust with consumers, so they know every piece of fruit in a Booth box came from that farm, and to keep potentially infected fruit out. 

HLB is a disease spread by the insect Asian citrus psyllid, which infects trees with a slow-growing bacteria while it feeds on their shoots. It’s commonly spread as the insect travels across borders in fruit or tree cuttings, but a warming climate is speeding things along. The transmission of citrus greening depends on temperature—both to ensure that the psyllid survives and that the host trees are at their most vulnerable. Temperatures between 60 and 90 degrees Fahrenheit allow the disease to thrive. Research has shown that areas that stay within that range for at least half of the year have the most cases of HLB. 

As global temperatures rise, citrus greening infestations can—and will—move further north. Tracking the spread of HLB is, in some ways, tracking the warming climate. 

Growers can often, unknowingly, graft an infected tree limb onto their otherwise healthy stock. That’s how citrus groves in Texas, and most especially Florida, fell victim to the disease. HLB was first discovered in Florida in 2005, where it promptly tore through the state’s orange and grapefruit groves, infecting close to 90 percent of the citrus. Nearly 20 years later, last season’s orange production is a mere 16 percent of the yield in 2003. And overall citrus production continues to fall, every year for the past five years. This year’s orange yield is predicted to be 25 percent lower than last years’ final production. 

Across the country, California growers have paid close attention to what their colleagues in Florida experienced, and they have no desire to go down the same road. “We see those numbers [from Florida], and it’s very, very frightening,” says Plumlee. As California’s annual temperatures fall squarely in the range for optimal HLB transmission, growers are as proactive as possible, even getting state legislation passed that allows citrus growers to essentially tax themselves and put the money towards research and eradication programs. “We’ve been fairly successful thus far; it still hasn’t been found in commercial orchards,” says Plumlee. 

California is home to roughly 300,000 acres of citrus production across the state. There have been infected trees found in California, throughout Los Angeles and Orange counties and along the coast near San Diego. But, so far, the bacteria has stuck to residential trees or others easily removed. 

“Last year, some nursery stock was sent from South Carolina from a nursery that had citrus canker,” says Victoria Hornbaker, director of the Citrus Pest and Disease Prevention Division at the California Department of Food and Agriculture. “But our team was able to react incredibly quickly to get out to those locations, collect that nursery stock, destroy it and do a one-mile survey of all citrus around those locations to make sure that we didn’t see any symptoms of citrus canker in the environment. So, that is a good example of how quickly we can mobilize and respond to potential issues regarding citrus.”

The citrus industry isn’t just important within California but across the country. Florida may be known for oranges, but it’s primarily grown oranges for juice. California has historically been the home of fresh citrus, growing 85 percent of the nation’s table fruit. “If we lose California citrus, we also lose our national and international market,” Hornbaker says. That means importing more citrus from outside the country, raising prices, and losing a tremendous amount of revenue all around. 

That’s why California growers have such a focus on proactivity, and why there’s an incredible amount of research into citrus greening coming out of California institutions. University of California, Riverside is working on a treatment that effectively kills the bacteria, although it’s still being tested within industry. Growers are experimenting with higher-density planting, putting more trees in the ground per acre, to get a higher yield in a shorter amount of time. Although, as Plumlee explains, that also has a significant drawback. “The longevity of planting like that might not be 50 years; it may only be 25. Because once the trees fill in, you kind of hit this plateau on what your production level can be. So, in the face of HLB, you’re going to turn the ground over faster.”

Breeders are also working to find new varieties that are less susceptible to HLB. The Sugar Belle mandarin, the hybrid of a clementine and a Minneola, has shown promising resistance. The new variety was born out of research from the University of Florida and released to growers across the state in 2009. More than a decade later, the Sugar Belle is among the top-grown varieties in the state.

Oddly, there does seem to be a correlation between the size of the citrus and the resistance to the bacteria, although it’s not clear if size is a determining factor or simply a coincidence. But Neil McRoberts, a professor of plant pathology at University of California, Davis, says that grapefruit and large oranges are less resistant to the disease, with smaller mandarins showing more disease resistance. “Because our citrus comes from so few different progenitor lines, they don’t have any natural resistance to the bacterium. So, none of our favorite citrus types and varieties have much resistance in general,” McRoberts explains. 

There could be a cure out there. But it won’t be on the horizon in five years or even 10. “I can see that, maybe in 20 years, we’ll be in a position where, if we don’t actually have a cure, we’ll at least have citrus that is able to stand up and keep producing a crop,” says McRoberts. “There are some promises out there, but it’s slow work.”

In the meantime, Plumlee and other growers have no choice but to keep going and keep growing. “You can’t just throw up your hands and quit. You keep doing the science and the trials and try to solve this puzzle. But, in the short term, there’s not a whole lot that you can do that we haven’t already done.” Growers like Plumlee have a crop that’s vital to the state and the nation and a disease that they are fighting to keep at bay. For now, they simply have to hold on—for a decade or two—until more effective methods are available. 

“That is the scary part,” says Plumlee. “If we had something today, right out of the lab that works, we’re still 10 or 15 years from proving it out that it actually works. And then another 10, probably before it’s all implemented out in the industry. So, we know that time is not our friend.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline There’s no cure for citrus greening. California growers have no choice but to keep going. on Jul 16, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Emily Baron Cadloff, Modern Farmer.